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Copyright, 1900, by W. B, Conkey Company. 



'68733 



CONTENTS. , 

'j PAGE 

ESSAY I. 

Intellect 5 ^ 

ESSAY II. 

Art , 28 

ESSAY III. 

The Poet 47 

ESSAY IV. 

Experience ^ 8S 

ESSAY V. 

Character 1^-30 

ESSAY VI. 

Manners 15S 

ESSAY VII. 

Gifts 195 

ESSAY VIII. 

Nature 202 

ESSAY IX. 

Politics 231 

ESSAY X. 

Nominalist and Realist 25s 

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

Lecture at Armory Hall 28a 

3 



ESSAY L 



INTELLECT. 

Every substance is negatively electric to that 
which stands above it in the chemical tables, 
positively to that which stands below it. Water 
dissolves wood and stone, and salt; air dis- 
solves water ; electric fire dissolves air, but the 
intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, 
and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature 
in its resistless menstruum. Intellect lies be- 
hind genius, which is intellect constructive. 
Intellect is the simple power anterior to all 
action or construction. Gladly would I unfold 
in calm degrees a natural history of the intel- 
lect, but what man has yet been able to mark 
the steps and boundaries of that transparent 
essence? The first ^questions are always to be 
asked, and the wisest doctor is graveled by the 
inquisitiveness of a child. How can we speak 
of the action of the mind under any divisions, 
as, of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, 
and so forth, since it melts will into perception, 
knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. 

5 



6 ESSAY I. 

Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision 
of the eye, but is union with the things known. 
Intellect and intellection signify, to the com- 
mon ear consideration of abstract truth. The 
consideration of time and place, of you and 
me, of profit and hurt, tyrannize over most 
men*s minds. Intellect separates the fact con- 
sidered from you, from all local and personal 
reference, and discerns it as if it existed for its 
own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affec- 
tions as dense and colored mists. In the fog 
of good and evil affections, it is hard for man 
to walk forward in a straight line. Intellect is 
void of affection, and sees an object as it stands 
in the light of science, cool and disengaged. 
The intellect goes out of the individual, floats 
over its own personality, and regards it as a 
fact, and not as I and mine. He who is im- 
mersed in what concerns person or place, can- 
not see the problem of existence. This the 
intellect always ponders. Nature shows all 
things formed and bound. The intellect pierces 
the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic 
likeness between remote things and reduces all 
things into a few principles. 
"The making a fact the subject of thought 
raises it. All that mass of mental and moral 
phenomena which we do not make objects of 



INTELLECT. 7 

voluntary thought come within the power of 
fortune; they constitute the circumstance of 
daily life; they are subject to change to fear 
and hope. Every man beholds his human 
condition with a degree of melancholy. As a 
ship aground is battered by the waves so man 
imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy 
of coming events. But a truth separated by 
the intellect is no longer a subject of destiny. 
We behold it as a god upraised above care and 
fear. And so any fact in our life or any record 
of our fancies or reflections, disentangled from 
the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an 
object impersonal and immortal. It is the last 
restored, but embalmed. A better art than 
that of Egypt has taken fear and corruption 
out of it. It is eviscerated of care. It is 
offered for science. What is addressed to us 
for contemplation does not threaten us, but 
makes us intellectual beings. 

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous 
in every step. The mind that grows could not 
predict the times, the means, the mode of that 
spontaneity. God enters by a private door into 
every individual. Long prior to the age of 
reflection, is the thinking of the mind. Out of 
darkness, it came insensibly into the marvelous 
light of to-day. Over it always reigned a firm 



8 ESSAY I. 

law. In the period of infancy it accepted and 
disposed of all impressions from the surround- 
ing creations after its own way. Whatever 
any mind doth or saith, is after a law. It has 
no random act or word. And this native law 
remains over it after it has come to reflection 
or conscious thought. In the most worn, pe- 
dantic, introverted, self-tormentor's life, the 
greatest part is incalculable by him, unfor- 
seen, unimaginable, and must be until he can 
take himself up by his own ears. What am I? 
What has my will done to make me that I am? 
Nothing. I ave been floated into this thought, 
this hour, this connection of events, by might 
and mind sublime, and my ingenuity and wil- 
fulness have not thwarted, have not aided to 
an appreciable degree. 

Our spontaneous action is always the best. 
You cannot, with your best deliberation and 
heed, come so close to any question as your 
spontaneous glance shall bring you, whilst you 
rise from your bed, or walk abroad in the 
morning after meditating the matter before 
sleep, on the previous night. Always our 
thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of 
thought is, therefore, vitiated as much by too 
violent direction given by our will, as by too 
great negligence. We do not determine what 



INTELLECT. 9 

we will think. We only open our senses, clear 
away, as we can, all obstruction from the fact, 
and suffer the intellect to see. We have little 
control over our thoughts. We are the prison- 
ers of ideas. They catch us up for moments 
into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that 
we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like 
children, without an effort to make them our 
own. By-and-by we fall out of that rapture, 
bethink us where we have been, what we have 
seen, and repeat, as truly as we can, what we 
have beheld. As far as we can recall these 
ecstasies, we carry away in the ineffaceable 
memory, the result, and all men and all the 
ages confirm it. It is called Truth, But the 
moment we cease to report, and attempt to 
correct and contrive, it is not truth. 

If we consider what persons have stimulated 
and profited us, we shall perceive the superi- 
ority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle 
over the arithmetical or logical. The first 
always contains the second, but virtual and 
latent. We want, in every man, a long logic; 
we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it 
must not be spoken. Logic is the procession 
or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; 
but its virtue is as silent method; the moment 



10 ESSAY I. 

it would appear as propositions, and have a 
separate value, it is worthless. 

In every man's mind, some images, words, 
and facts remain, without effort on his part to 
imprint them, which others forget, and after- 
ward these illustrate to him important laws. 
All our progress is an unfolding, like the veg- 
etable bud. You have first an instinct, then 
an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has 
root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the 
end, though you can render no reason. It is 
vain to hurry it. By trusting to the end, it 
shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why 
you believe. 

Each mind has its own method. A true man 
never acquires after college rules. What you 
have aggregated in a natural manner, surprises 
and delights when it is produced. For we can- 
not oversee each other's secret. And hence 
the differences between men in natural en- 
dowment are insignificant in comparison with 
their common wealth. Do you think the por- 
, ter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experi- 
ences, no wonders for you? Everybody knows 
as much as the savant. The walls of rude 
minds are scrawled all over with facts, with 
thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern 
and read the inscriptions. Every man, in the 



INTELLECT. 11 

degree in which he has wit and culture, finds 
his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of 
living and thinking of other men, and espe- 
cially of those classes whose minds have not ; 
been subdued by the drill of school education. 

This instinctive action never ceases in a 
healthy mind, but becomes richer and more 
frequent in its informations through all states 
of culture. At last comes the era of reflec- . 
tion, when we not only observe, but take pains "^ 
to observe ; when we of set purpose, sit down 
to consider an abstract truth ; when we keep 
the mind's eye open, whilst we converse, whilst 
we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the se- 
cret law of some class of facts, s/ 

What is the hardest task in the world? To 
think. I would put myself in the attitude to 
look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. 
I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. 
I seem to know what he meant, who said, No 
man can see God face to face and live. For 
example, a man explores the basis of civil gov- 
ernment. Let him intend his mind without 
respite, without rest, in one direction. His 
best heed long time awails him nothing. Yet 
thoughts are flitting before him. We all but 
apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We 
say, I will walk abroad, and the truth will take 



12 ESSAY I. 

form and clearness to me. We go forth, but 
cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only 
the stillness and composed attitude of the 
library to seize the thought. But we come 
in, and are as far from it as at first. Then, in 
\ a moment, and unannounced, the truth ap- 
pears. A certain, wandering light appears, 
and is the distinction, the principle we 
wanted. But the oracle comes, because we 
had previously laid siege to the shrine. It 
seems as if the law of the intellect resembled 
that law of nature by which we now inspire, 
now expire the breath ; by which the heart now 
draws in then hurls out the blood, —the law of 
undulation. So now you must labor with 
your brains, and now you must forbear your 
activity, and see what the great Soul showeth. 
Our intellections are mainly prospective. 
The immortality of man is as legitimately 
preached from the intellections as from the 
moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly 
prospective. Its present value is its least. It 
is a little seed. Inspect what delights you in 
Plutarch, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes. Each 
truth that a writer acquires, is a lantern which 
he instantly turns full on what facts and 
thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, 
all the mats and rubbish which had littered his 



INTELLECT. 13 

garret, become precious. Every trivial fact in 
his private biography becomes an illustration 
of this new principle, revisits the day, and de- 
lights all men by its piquancy and new charm. 
Men say, where did he get this? and think 

"there was something divine in his life. But\ 
no; they have myriads of facts just as good, 
would they only get a lamp to ransack their 
attic withal. 

We are all wise. The difference between 

- persons is not in wisdom, but in art. I knew, 
in an academical club, a person who always 
deferred to me, who, seeing my whim for writ- 
ing, fancied that my experiences had some- 
what superior; whilst I saw that his experi- 
ences were as good as mine. Give them to me, 
and I would make the same use of them. He 
held the old; he holds the new; I had the ; 
habit of tacking together the old and the new, ' 
which he did not use to exercise. This may 
hold in the great examples. Perhaps if we 
should meet Shakespeare, we should not be 
conscious of any steep inferiority ; no, but of a 
great equality, — only that he possessed a 
strange skill of using, of classifying his facts, 
which we lack. For notwithstanding our utter 
incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet 
and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit. 



14 ESSAY I. 

and immense knowledge of life and liquid elo- 
quence find in us all. 

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or 
make hay, or hoe corn, and then retire within 
doors, and shut your eyes, and press them 
with your hand, you shall still see apples hang- 
ing in the bright light, with boughs and leaves 
thereto, or the tasseled grass, or the corn- 
\ flags, and this for five or six hours afterward. 
There lie the impressions on the retentive 
organ, though you knew it not. So lies the 
whole series of natural images with which 
your life has made you acquainted, in your 
memory, though you know it not, and a thrill 
of passion flashes light on their dark chamber, 
and the active power seizes instantly the fit 
image, as the word of its momentary thought. 
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. 
Our history, we are sure, is quite tame. We 
have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But 
our wiser years still run back to the despised 
recollections of childhood, and always we are 
fishing up some wonderful article out of that 
pond; until, by-and-by, we begin to suspect 
that the biography of the one foolish person 
we know, is, in reality, nothing less than the 
miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes 
of the Universal History. 



INTELLECT. 15 

In the intellect constructive, which we popu- 
larly designate by the word Genius, we observe 
the same balance of two elements, as in intel- 
lect receptive. The constructive intellect pro-\ 
duces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, 
designs, systems. It is the generation of the 
mind, the marriage of thought with nature. -^ 
^To genius must always go two gifts, the 
thought and the publication. The first is rev- 
elation, always a miracle, which no frequency 
of occurrence, or incessant study can ever 
familiarize, but which must always leave the 
inquirer stupid with wonder. It is the advent 
of truth into the world, a form of thought 
now, for the first time bursting into the 
universe, a child of the old eternal soul, a 
piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. 
It seems, for the time, to inherit all that has 
yet existed, and to dictate to the unborn. It 
affects every thought of man, and goes to 
fashion every institution. But to make it 
available, it needs a vehicle or art by which it 
is conveyed to men. To be communicable, it 
must become picture or sensible object. We 
must learn the language of facts. The most 
wonderful inspirations die with their subject, 
if he has no hand to paint them to the senses. '" 
The ray of light passes invisible through 



16 ESSAY I. 

Space, and only when it falls on an object is it 
seen. When the spiritual energy is directed 
on something outward, then is it a thought. 
The relation between it and you, first makes 
you, the value of you, apparent to me. The 
rich, inventive genius of the painter must be 
smothered and lost for want of the power of 
drawing, and in our happy hours, we shoul4 
be inexhaustible poets, if once we could break 
through the silence into adequate rhyme. As 
all men have some access to primary truth, so 
all have some art or power of communica- 
tion in their head, but only in theartist does it 
descend into the hand. There is an inequality 
whose laws we do not yet know, between two 
men and between two moments of the same 
man, in respect to this faculty. In common 
hours we have the same facts as in the uncom^ 
mon or inspired, but they do not sit for their '^ 
portraits, they are not detached, but lie in a 
web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; 
but the power of picture or expression, in the 
most enriched and flowing nature, implies a 
mixture of will, a certain control over the 
spontaneous states, without which no produc- 
tion is possible. It is a conversion of all 
nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the 
eye of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of 



INTELLECT. 17 

choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary 
seems to be spontaneous also. It does not 
flow from experience only or mainly, but from 
a richer source. Not by any conscious imita- 
tion of particular forms are the grand strokes 
of the painter executed, but by repairing to 
the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. 
Who is the first drawing-master? Without 
instruction we know very well the ideal of the 
human form. A child knows if an arm or a 
leg be distorted in a picture, if the attitude be 
natural, or grand, or mean, though he has 
never received any instruction* in drawing, or 
heard any conversation on the subject, nor 
can himself draw with correctness a single 
feature. A good form strikes all eyes pleas- 
antly, long before they have any science on 
the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty 
hearts in palpitation, prior to all considera- 
tion of the mechanical proportions of the 
features and head. We may owe to dreams 
some light on the fountain of this skill ; for, 
as soon as we let our will go, and let the 
unconscious states ensue, see what cunning 
draughtsmen we are! We entertain ourselves 
with wonderful forms of men, of women, of 
animals, of gardens, of woods, and of mon- 
sters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we 



18 ESSAY I. 

then draw, has no awkwardness, or inexperi- 
ence, no meagreness or poverty ; it can design 
well, and group well ; its composition is full of 
art, its colors are well laid on, and the whole 
canvas which it paints, is life-like, and apt to 
touch us with terror, with tenderness, with 
desire, and with grief. Neither are the artist's 
copies from experience, ever mere copies, but 
always touched and softened by tints from this 
ideal domain. 

The conditions essential to a constructive 
mind, do not appear to be so often combined 
but that a good sentence or verse remains 
fresh and memorable for a long time. Yet 
v/hen we write with ease, and come out into 
the free air of thought, we seem to be assured 
that nothing is easier than to continue this 
communication at pleasure. Up, down, 
around, the kingdom of thought has no enclos- 
ures, but the Muse makes us free of her city. 
Well, the world has a million writers. One 
would think, then, that good thought would 
be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts 
of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet 
we can count all our good books; nay, I 
remember any beautiful verse for twenty 
years. It is true that the discerning intellect 
of the world is always greatly in advance of 



INTELLECT. 19 

the creatives so that always there are many 
competent judges of the best book, and few 
writers of the best books. But some of the 
conditions of intellectual construction are of 
rare occurrence. The intellect is a whole, and 
demands integrity in every work. This is 
resisted equally by a man's devotion to a 
single thought, and by his ambition to com» 
bine too many. 

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man 
fasten his attention on a single aspect of 
truth, and apply himself to that alone for a 
long time, the truth becomes distorted and not 
itself, but falsehood; herein resembling the 
air, which is our natural element, and the 
breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of the 
same be directed on the body for a time, it 
causes cold, fever, and even death. How 
wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, 
the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any 
possessed mortal, whose balance is lost by the 
exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient 
insanity. Every thought is a prison also. I 
cannot see what you see, because I am caught 
up by a strong wind and blown so far in one 
direction, that I am out of the hoop of your 
horizon. 

Is it any better, if the student, to avoid this 



20 ESSAY I. 

offence, and to liberalize himself, aims to 
make a mechanical whole, of history, or 
science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition 
of all the facts that fall within his vision? The 
world refuses to be analyzed by addition and 
subtraction. When we are young, we spend 
much time and pains in filling our note-books 
with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, 
Politics, Art, in the hope that in the course of 
a few years, we shall have condensed into our 
encyclopedia, the net value of all the theories 
at which the world has yet arrived. But year 
after year our tables get no completeness, and 
at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, 
whose arcs will never meet. 

Neither by detachment, neither by aggrega- 
tion, is the integrity of the intellect trans- 
mitted to its works, but by a vigilance which 
bring the intellect in its greatness and. best 
state to operate every moment. 

It must have the same wholeness which 
nature has. Although no diligence can rebuild 
the universe in a model by the best accumula- 
tion or disposition of details, yet does the world 
reappear in miniature in every event, so that 
all the laws of nature may be read in the 
smallest fact. The intellect must have the 
like perfection in its apprehension, and in its 



INTELLECT. 21 

works. For this reason, an index or mercury 
of intellectual proficiency is the perception 
of identity. We talk with accomplished persons 
who appear to be strangers in nature. The 
cloud, the tree, the turf, the bird are not 
theirs, have nothing of them: the world is 
only their lodging and table. But the poet 
whose verses are to be spheral and complete, 
is one whom nature cannot deceive, whatso- 
ever face of strangeness she may put on. He 
feels a strict consanguinity, and detects more 
likeness than variety in all her changes. We 
are stung by the desire for new thought, but 
when we receive a new thought, it is only the 
old thought with a new face, and though we 
make it our own, we instantly crave another; 
we are not really enriched. For the truth was 
in us, before it was reflected to us from 
natural objects; and the profound genius will 
cast the likeness of all creatures into every 
product of his wit. 

But if the constructive powers are rare, and 
it is given to few men to be poets, yet every 
man is a receiver of this descending holy 
ghost, and may well study the laws of its influx. 
Exactly parallel is the whole rule of intel- 
lectual duty, to the rule of moral duty. A 
self-denial no less austere than the saint's, is 



22 ESSAY I. 

demanded of the scholar. He must worship 
truth, and forego all things for that, and 
choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in 
thought is thereby augmented. 

God offers to every mind its choice between 
truth and repose. Take which you please, — 
you can never have both. Between these, as 
a pendulum, man oscillates ever. He in 
whom the love of repose predominates, will 
accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the 
first political party he meets, — most likely, his 
father's. He gets rest, commodity and repu- 
tation ; but he shuts the door of truth. He in 
whom the love of truth predominates will 
keep himself aloof from all moorings and 
afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and 
recognize all the opposite negations between 
which, as walls, his being is swung. He sub- 
mits to the inconvenience of suspense and 
imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for 
truth, as the other is not, and respects the 
highest law of his being. 

The circle of the green earth he must 
measure with his shoes, to find the man who 
can yield him truth. He shall then know 
that there is somewhat more blessed and great 
in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the 
hearing man: unphappy the speaking man. 



INTELLECT. ^ 

As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a 
beautiful element, and am not conscious of 
any limits to my nature. The suggestions are 
thousandfold that I hear and see. The 
waters of the great deep have ingress and 
egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I 
confine, and am less. When Socrates speaks. 
Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame 
that they do not speak. They also are good. 
He likewise defers to them, loves them, 
whilst he speaks. Because a true and natural 
man contains and is the same truth which an 
eloquent man articulates : but in the eloquent 
man, because he can articulate it, it seems 
something the less to reside, and he turns to 
these silent beautifvil with the more inclination 
and respect. The ancient sentence said, '*Let 
us be silent, for so are the gods. ' ' Silence is 
a solvent that destroys personality, and gives 
us leave to be great and universal. Every 
man's progress is through a succession of 
teachers, each of whom seems at the time to 
have a superlative influence, but it , at last 
gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept 
it all. Jesus says. Leave father, mother, 
house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves 
all, receives more. This is as true intellect- 
ually as morally. Each new mind we 



24 . ESSAY I. 

approach, seems to require an abdication of all 
our past and present possessions. A new 
doctrine seems, at first, a supervision of all 
pur opinions, tastes, and manner of living. 
Such has Swedenborg, such has Kent, such has 
Coleridge, such has Cousin seemed to many 
young men in this country. Take thankfully 
and heartily all they can give. Exhaust 
them, wrestle with them, let them not go until 
their blessing be won, and after a short sea- 
son, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of 
influence withdrawn, and they will be no 
longer an alarming meteor, but one more 
bright star shining serenely in your heaven, 
and blending its light with all your. day. 

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly 
to that which draws him, because that is his 
own, he is to refuse himself to that which 
draws him not, whatsoever fame and authority 
may attend it, because it is not his own. 
Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect. 
One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a 
capillary column of water is a balance for the 
sea. It must treat things, and books, and 
sovereign genius, as itself also a sovereign. 
If ^schylus be that man he is taken for, he 
has not yet done his office, when he has edu- 
cated the learned of Europe for a thousand 



INTELLECT. 25 

years. He is now to approve himself a master 
of delight to me also. If he cannot do that, 
all his fame shall avail him nothing with me. 
I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand 
^schyluses to my intellectual integrity. 
Especially take the same ground in regard to 
abstract truth, the science of the mind. The 
Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume, Schelling, 
Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philos- 
ophy of the mind, is only a more or less 
awkward translator of things in your con- 
sciousness, which you have also your way of 
seeing, perhaps of denominating, v Say then, 
instead of too timidly pouring into his obscure 
sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering 
back to you your consciousness. He has not 
succeeded ; now let another try. If Plato can- 
not, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, 
then perhaps Kant. Anyhow when at last 
it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but 
a simple, natural, common state, which the 
writer restores to you. 

But let us end these didactics. I will not, 
though the subject might provoke it, speak 
to the open question between Truth and Love. 
I shall not presume to interfere in the old 
politics of the skies; *'The cherubim know 
most; the seraphim love most.'* The gods 



26 ESSAY I. 

shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot 
recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, 
without remembering that lofty and seques- 
tered class of men who have been its prophets 
and oracles, the high priesthood of the pure 
reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the 
principles of thought from age to age. When 
at long intervals, we turn over their abstruse 
pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand 
air of these few, these great spiritual lords 
who have walked in the world — these of the 
old religion — dwelling in a worship which 
makes the sanctities of Christianity look par- 
venues and popular; for *' persuasion is in soul, 
but necessity is in intellect." This band of 
grandees, Hermes, Heraciitus, Empedocles, 
Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Syne- 
sius, and the rest, have somewhat so vast in 
their logic, so primary in their thinking, that 
it seems antecedent to all the ordinary distinc- 
tions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at 
once poetry, and music, and dancing, and 
astronomy, and mathematics. I am present at 
the sowing of the seed of the world. With a 
geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the 
foundations of nature. The truth and gran- 
deur of their thoughts is proved by its scope 
and applicability, for it commands the entire 



INTELLECT. 27 

schedule and inventory of things, for its illus- 
tration. But what marks its elevation, and has 
even a comic look to us, is the innocent seren- 
ity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit 
in their clouds, and from age to age prattle to 
each other, and to no contemporary. Well 
assured that their speech is intelligible, and 
the most natural thing in the world, they 
add thesis to thesis, without a moment's 
heed of the universal astonishment of the 
human race below, who do not comprehend 
their plainest argument; nor do they ever 
relent so much as to insert a popular or 
explaining sentence ; nor testify the least dis- 
pleasure or petulance at the dullness of their 
amazed auditory. The angels are so enamored 
of the language that is spoken in heaven, that 
they will not distort their lips with the hissing 
and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their 
own, whether there be any who understand it 
or not. 



ESSAY II. 



ART. 



Because the soul is progressive, it never 
quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts 
the production of a new and fairer whole. 
This appears in works both of the useful and 
the fine arts, if we employ the proper distinc- 
tion of works according to their aim, either at 
use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imi- 
tation, but creation is the aim. In landscapes, 
the painter should give the suggestion of a 
fairer creation than we know. The details, 
the prose of nature he should omit, and give 
as only the spirit and splendor. He should 
know that the landscape has beauty for his 
eyes, because it expresses a thought which is 
to him good; and this, because the same 
power which sees through his eyes, is seen in 
that spectacle ; and he will come to value the 
expression of nature, and not nature itself, 
and so exalt in his copy, the features that 
please him. He will give the gloom of gloom, 
and the sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait, 



ART. 29 

he must inscribe the character, and not the 
features, and must esteem the man who sits 
to him as himself only an imperfect picture or 
likeness of the aspiring original within. 

What is that abridgment and selection we 
observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the 
creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that 
higher illumination which teaches to convey a 
larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a 
man but nature's finer success in self-explica- 
tion? What is a man but a finer and com- 
pacter landscape than the horizon figures na- 
ture's eclecticism? and what is his speech, his 
love of painting, love of nature, but a still finer 
success? all the weary miles and tons of space 
and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it 
contracted into a musical word, or the most 
cunning stroke of the pencil? 

But the artist must employ the symbols in 
use in his day and nation, to convey his en- 
larged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new 
in art is always formed out of the old. The 
Genius of the Hour always sets his inefface- 
able seal on the work, and gives it an inexpres- 
sible charm for the imagination. As far as 
the spiritual ^character of the period over- 
powers the artist, and finds expression in his 
work, so far it will always retain a certain 



30 ESSAY II. 

grandeur, and will represent to future be- 
holders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the 
Divine. No man can quite exclude this 
element of Necessity from his labor. No man 
can quite emancipate himself from his age 
and country, or produce a model in which the 
education, the religion, the politics, usages, 
and arts, of his times shall have no share. 
Though he were never so original, never so 
wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his 
work every trace of the thoughts amidst which 
it grew. The very avoidance betrays the 
usage he avoids. Above his will, and out of 
his sight, he is necessitated, by the air he 
breathes, and the idea on which he and his 
contemporaries live and toil, to share the 
manner of his times, without knowing wh?±f* 
that manner is. Now that which is inevita- 
ble in the work, has a higher charm than ind-^- 
vidual talent can ever give, inasmuch as thd 
artist's pen or chisel seems to have been held 
and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a 
line in the history of the human race. This 
circumstance gives a value to the Egyptian 
hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese, and 
Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. 
They denote the height of the human soul in 
that hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung 



ART. 31 

from a necessity as deep as the world. Shall 
I now add that the whole extant product of 
the plastic arts has herein this highest value, 
as history ; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of 
that after, perfect and beautiful, according to 
whose ordinations all beings advance to their 
beatitude. 

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the 
ofBce of art to educate the perception of beauty. 
We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes 
have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhi- 
bition of single traits, to assist and lead the 
dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we 
behold what is carved and painted, as stu- 
dents of the mystery of Form. The virtue of 
art lies in detachment, in sequestering one 
■object from the embarrassing variety. Until 
..ae thing comes out from the connection of 
^ings, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, 
but no thought. Our happiness and unhappi- 
ness are unproductive. The infant lies in a 
pleasing trance, but his individual character, 
and his practical power depend on his daily 
progress in the separation of things, and deal- 
ing with one at a time. Love and all the pas- 
sions concentrate all existence around a single 
form. It is the habit of certain minds to give 
an all-excluding fulness to the object, the 



32 ESSAY II. 

thought, the word, they alight upon, and to 
make that for the time the deputy of the world. 
These are the artists, the orators, the leaders 
of society. The power to detach, and to mag- 
nify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in 
the hands of the orator and the poet. This 
rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary emi- 
nency of an object, so remarkable in Burke, in 
Byron, in Carlyle, — the' painter and sculptor 
exhibit in color and in stone. The power 
depends on the depth of the artist's insight of 
that object he contemplates. For every object 
has its roots in central nature, and may of 
course be so exhibited to us as to represent 
the world. Therefore, each work of genius is 
the tyrant of the hour, and concentrates at- 
tention on itself. For the time, it is the only 
thing worth naming, to do that, — be it a 
sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an 
oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, 
or of a voyage of discovery. Presently we 
pass to some other object, which rounds itself 
into a whole, as did the first ; for example, a 
well laid garden: and nothing seems worth 
doing but the laying out of gardens. I should 
think fire the best thing in the world, if I were 
not acquainted with air, and water, and earth. 
For it is the right and property of all natural 



ART. 33 

objects, of all genuine talents, of all native 
properties whatsoever, to be for their moment 
the top of the world. A squirrel leaping from 
bough to bough, and making the wood but one 
wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less 
than a lion, is beautiful, self sufficing and, 
stands then and there for nature. A good 
ballad draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, 
as much as an epic has done before. A dog, 
drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies, 
and is a reality not less than the frescoes of 
Angelo. From this succession of excellent 
objects learn we at least the immensity of the 
world, the opulence of human nature, which 
can run out to infinitude in any direction. 
But I also learn that what astonished and fas- 
cinated me in the first work, astonished me in 
the second work also, that excellence of all 
things is one. 

The office of painting and sculpture seems 
to be merely initial. The best pictures can 
easily tell us their last secret. The best pic- 
tures are rude draughts of a few of the mirac- 
ulous dots and lines and dyes which make up 
the ever-changing ''landscape with figures" 
amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to be 
to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When 
that has educated the frame to self-possession, 
s 



84 ESSAY II. 

to nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the danc- 
ing-master are better forgotten; so painting 
teaches me the splendor of color and the 
expression of form, and, as I see many pictures 
and higher genius in the art, I see the bound- 
less opulence of the pencil, the indiflferency in 
which the artist stands free to choose out of 
the possible forms. If he can draw every- 
thing, why draw anything? and then is my eye 
opened to the eternal picture which nature 
paints in the street with moving men and 
children, beggars, and fine ladies, draped in 
red, and green, and blue, and gray; long- 
haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, 
wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, — 
capped and based by heaven, earth, and sea. 

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely 
the same lesson. As picture teaches the color- 
ing, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When 
I have seen fine statues, and afterward enter 
a public assembly, I undej[^stand well what he 
meant who said, **When I have been reading 
Homer, all men look like giants.*' I too see 
that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of 
the eye, its training to the niceties and curi- 
osities of its function. There is no statue like 
this living man, with his infinite advantage 
over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. 



ART. 35 

What a gallery of art have I here! No man- 
nerist made these varied groups and diverse 
original single figures. Here is the artist him- 
self improvising, grim and glad, at this block, 
Now one thought strikes him, now another, 
and with each moment he altars the whole 
air, attitude and expression of his clay. Away 
with your nonsense of oil and easels, of marble 
and chisels; except to open your eyes to the 
witchcraft of eternal art, they are hypocritical 
rubbish. 

The reference of all production at last to an 
Aboriginal Power, explains the traits common 
to all works of the highest art, that they are 
universally intelligible; that they restore to 
us the simplest states of mind; and are relig- 
ious. Smce what skill is therein shown is the 
appearance of the original soul, a jet of pure 
light; it should produce a similar impression 
to that made by natural objects. In happy 
hours, nature appears to us one with art; art 
perfected, — the work of genius. And the indi- 
vidual in whom simple tastes and susceptibility 
to all the great human influences, overpower 
the accidents of a local and special culture, is 
the best critic of art. \ Though we travel the 
world over to find the beautiful, we must carry 
it with us, or we find it not. I The best of 



36 ESSAY 11. 

beanty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, 
in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, 
namely, a radiation from the work of art, of 
human character, — a wonderful expression 
through stone or canvas or musical sound of 
the deepest and simplest attributes of our 
nature, and therefore most intelligible at last 
to those souls which have these attributes. 
In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry 
of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tus- 
can aiad Venetian masters, the highest charm 
is the universal language they speak. A con- 
fession of moral nature, of purity, love, and 
hope, breathes from them all. That which 
we carry to them, the same we bring back 
more fairly illustrated in the memory. The 
traveler who visits the Vatican, and passes 
from chamber to chamber through galleries of 
statues, vases, sarcophagi, and candelabra, 
through all forms of beauty, cut in the richest 
materials, is in danger of forgetting the sim- 
plicity of the principles out of which they all 
sprung, and that they had their origin from 
thoughts and laws in his own breast. He 
studies the technical rules on these wonderful 
remains, but forgets that these works were 
not always thus constellated; that they are 
the contributions of many ages, and many 



ART. 37 

countries ; that each came out of the solitary 
workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps in 
ignorance of the existence of other sculpture, 
created his work without other model, save 
life, household life, and the sweet and smart of 
personal relations, of beating hearts, and 
meeting eyes, of poverty, and necessity, and 
hope, and fear. These were his inspirations, 
and these are the effects he carries home to 
your heart and mind. In proportion to his 
force, the artist will find in his work an outlet 
for his proper character. He must not be in 
any manner pinched or hindered by his ma- 
terial, but through his necessity of imparting 
himself, the adamant will be wax in his hands, 
and will allow an adequate communication of 
himself in his full stature and proportion. 
Not a conventional nature and culture need 
he cumber himself with, nor ask what is the 
mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house, 
and weather, and manner of living, which 
poverty and the fate of birth have made at 
once so odious and so dear, in the gray, un- 
painted wood cabin, on the corner of a New 
Hampshire farm, or in the log hut of the back- 
woods, or in the narrow lodging where he has 
endured the constraints and seeming of a city 
poverty, — will serve as well as any other con- 



S8 ESSAY II. 

dition as the symbol of a thought which pours 
itself indifferently through all. 

I remember, when in my younger days, I had 
heard of the wonders of Italian painting, I 
fancied the great pictures would be great 
strangers; some surprising combination of 
color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric 
pearl and gold, like the spontoons and stand- 
ards of the militia, which play such pranks in 
the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I 
was to see and acquire I knew not what. When 
I came at last to Rome, and saw with eyes the 
pictures, I found that genius left to novices 
the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and 
itself pierced directly to the simple and true ; 
that it was familiar and sincere ; that it was 
the old, eternal fact I have met already in so 
many forms; unto which I lived; that it was 
the plain you and me I knew so well, — had left 
at home in so many conversations. I had the 
same experience already in a church at Naples. 
There I saw that nothing was changed with 
me but the place, and said to myself,— *' Thou 
foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over 
four thousand miles of salt water, to find that 
which was perfect to thee, there at home?" — 
that fact I saw again in the Academmia at 
Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet 



ART. 39 

again when I came to Rome, and to the paint- 
ings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian and 
Leonardo da Vinci. *' What old mole ! workest 
thou in the earth so fast?'* It had traveled by 
my side; that which I fancied I had left in 
Boston, was here in the Vatican, and again at 
Milan, and at Paris, and made all traveling 
ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this 
of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not 
that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too 
picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much 
as common sense and plain dealing. All great 
actions have been simple, and all great 
pictures are. 

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an 
eminent example of this peculiar merit. A 
calm, benignant beauty shines over all this 
picture, and goes directly to the heart. It 
seems almost to call you by name. The sweet 
and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet 
how it disappoints all ' florid expectations! 
This familiar, simple, home-speaking counte- 
nance, is as if one should meet a friend. The 
knowledge of picture-dealers has its value, but 
listen not to their criticism when your heart is 
touched by genius. It was not painted for 
them, it was painted for you ; for such as had 



40 ESSAY II. 

eyes capable of being touched by simplicity 
and lofty emotions. 

Yet when we have said all our fine things 
about the arts, we must end with a frank con- 
fession, that the arts, as we know them, are but 
initial. Our best praise is given to what they 
aimed and promised, not to the actual result. 
He has conceived meanly of the resources of 
man, who believes that the best age of produc- 
tion is past. The real value of the Iliad, or 
the Transfiguration, is as signs of power; 
billows or ripples they are of the great stream of 
tendency; tokens of the everlasting effort to 
produce, which even in its worst estate, the 
soul betrays. Art has not yet come to its 
maturity, if it do not put itself abreast with the 
most potent influences of the world, if it is not 
practical and moral, if it do not stand in con- 
nection with the conscience, if it do not make 
the poor and uncultivated feel that it addressed 
them with a voice of lofty cheer. There is 
higher work for Art than the arts. They are 
abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated 
instinct. Art is the need to create ; but in its 
essence, immense and universal, it is im- 
patient of working with lame or tied hands, 
and of making cripples and monsters, such as 
all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than 



ART. 41 

the creation of man and nature is its end. A 
man should find in it an outlet for his whole 
energy. He may paint and carve only as 
long as he can do that. Art should exhilarate: 
and throw down the walls of circumstance on 
every side, awakening in the beholder the 
same sense of universal relation and power 
which the work evinced in the artist, and its 
highest effect is to make new artists. 

Already History is old enough to witness 
the old age and disappearance of particular 
arts. The art of sculpture is long ago per- 
ished to any real effect. It was originally a 
useful art, a mode of writing, a savage's 
record of gratitude or devotion, and among a 
people possessed of a wonderful perception of 
form, this childish carving was refined to the 
utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game 
of a rude and youthful people, and not the 
manly labor of a wise and spiritual nation. 
Under an oak tree loaded with leaves and nuts, 
under a sky of eternal eyes, I stand in a 
thoroughfare ; but in the works of our plastic 
arts, and especially of sculpture, creation is 
driven into a corner. I cannot hide from my- 
self that there is a certain appearance of paltri- 
ness, as of toys, and the trumpery of a theatre, 
in sculpture. Nature transcends all our moods 



42 ESSAY II. 

of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. 
But the gallery stands at the mercy of our 
moods, and there is a moment when it be- 
comes frivolous. I do not wonder that New- 
ton, with an attention habitually engaged on 
the path of planets and suns, should have won- 
dered what the Earl of Pembroke found to 
admire in ** stone dolls. " Sculpture may serve 
to teach the pupil how deep is the secret of 
form, how purely the spirit can translate its 
meaning into that eloquent dialect. But the 
statue will look cold and false before that new 
activity which needs to roll through all things, 
and is impatient of counterfeit, and things 
not alive. Picture and sculpture are the cele- 
brations and festivities of form. But true art 
is never fixed, but always flowing. The 
sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the 
human voice when it speaks from its instant 
life, tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. 
The oratorio has already lost its relation to the 
morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that 
persuading voice is in tune with these. All 
works of art should not be detached, but ex- 
tempore performances. A great man is a new 
statue in every attitude and action. A beau- 
tiful woman is a picture which drives all be- 



ART. 4S 

holders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, 
as well as a poem or a romance. 

A true announcement of the law of creation, 
if a man were found worthy to declare it 
would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, 
and destroy its separate and contrasted exist- 
ence. The fountains of invention and beauty 
in modern society are all but dried up. A 
popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes 
us feel that we are all paupers in the alms- 
houses of this world, without dignity, without 
skill, or industr}^ Art is as poor and low. 
The old tragic Necessity, which lowers on the 
brows even of the Venuses and Cupids of the 
antique, and furnishes the sole apology for the 
intrusions of such anomalous figures into 
nature, — namely, that they were inevitable; 
that the artist was drunk^ with a passion for 
form which he could not resist, and which 
vented itself in these fine extravagancies, — no 
longer dignifies the chisel or the pencil. But 
the artist, and the connoisseur, now seek in 
art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum 
from the evils of life. Men are not well 
pleased with the figure they make in their own 
imagination, and they flee to art, and convey 
their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or 
a picture. Art makes the same effort which a 



44 ESSAY 11. 

sensual prosperity makes, namely, to detach 
the beautiful from the useful, to do up the 
work as unavoidable, and hating it, pass on to 
enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, 
this division of beauty from use the laws of 
nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is 
sought not from religion and love, but for 
pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty 
is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in 
stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction ; an 
effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is 
not beauty, is all that can be formed ; for the 
hand can never execute anything higher than 
the character can inspire. 

The art that thus separates, is itself first 
separated. Art must not be a superficial 
talent, but must begin farther back in man. 
Now men do not see nature to be beautiful, 
and they go to make a statue which shall be. 
They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and uncon- 
vertible, and console themselves with color- 
bags, and blocks of marble. They reject life 
as prosaic, and create a death which they call 
poetic. They despatch the day's weary 
chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They 
eat and drink, that they may afterward exe- 
cute the ideal. Thus is art vilified; the name 
conveys to the mind its secondary and bad 



ART. 45 

senses; it stands in the imagination, as some- 
what contrary to nature, and struck with death 
from the first. Would it not be better to begin 
higher up, — to serve the ideal before they eat 
and drink; to serve the ideal in eating and 
drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the 
functions of life? Beauty must come back to 
the useful arts, and the distinction between 
the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If 
history were truly told, if life were nobly 
spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to 
distinguish the one from the other. In nature 
all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore 
beautiful, because it is alive, moving, repro- 
ductive ; it is therefore useful, because it is 
symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come 
at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat 
in England or America, its history in Greece. 
It will come, as always, unannounced, and 
spring up between the feet of brave and 
earnest men. It is in vain that we look for 
genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts ; 
it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in 
new and necessary facts, in the field and road- 
side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from 
a religious heart it will raise to a divine use, 
the railroad, the insurance office, the joint 
stock company, our law, our primary assem- 



46 ESSAY II. 

blies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the 
electric jar, the prism and the chemist's retort 
in which we seek now only an economical use. 
Is not the selfish, and even cruel aspect which 
belongs to our great mechanical works, to 
mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of 
the mercenary impulses which these works 
obey? When its errands are noble and ade- 
quate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic 
between Old and New England, and arriving 
at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, — 
is a step of man into harmony with nature. 
The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along 
the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make 
it sublime. When science is learned in love, 
and its powers are wielded by love, they will 
appear the supplements and continuations of 
the material creation. 



ESSAY III. 



THE POET. 

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are 
often persons who have acquired some knowl- 
edge of admired pictures or sculptures, and 
have an inclination for whatever is elegant; 
but if you inquire whether they are beautiful 
souls, and whether their own acts are like fair 
pictures, you learn that they are selfish and 
sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you 
should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to 
produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. 
Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study 
of rules and particulars, or some limited judg- 
ment of color or form, which is exercised for 
amusement or for show. It is a proof of the 
shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies 
in the minds of our amateurs that men seem to 
have lost the perception of the instant depend- 
ence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine 
of forms in our philosophy. We were put into 
our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be car- 
ried about; but there is no accurate adjust- 

47 



48 ESSAY III. 

ment between the spirit and the organ, much 
less is the latter the germination of the form- 
er. So in regard to other forms, the intellec- 
tual men do not believe in any essential de- 
pendence of the material world on thought 
and volition. Theologians think it a pretty 
air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a 
ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they 
prefer to come again to the solid ground of his- 
torical evidence; and even the poets are con- 
tented with a civil and conformed manner of 
living, and to write poems from the fancy at a 
safe distance from their own experience. But 
the highest minds of the world have never 
ceased to explore the double meaning, or, 
shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or 
much more manifold meaning, of every sen- 
suous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, 
Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the 
masters of sculpture, picture and poetry. For 
we are not pans and barrows, nor even por- 
ters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children, 
of the fire, made of it, and only the same divin- 
ity transmuted, and at two or three removes, 
when we know least about it. And this hidden 
truth, that the fountain whence all this river 
of Time and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsi- 
cally ideal and beautiful, draws us to the con- 



THE POET. 49 

sideration of the natures and functions of the 
Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means and 
materials he uses, and to the general aspect of 
the art in the present time. 

The breadth of the problem is great, for the 
poet is representative. He stands among par- 
tial men or the complete man, and apprises us 
not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. 
The young man revers men of genius, be- 
cause, to speak truly, they are more himself 
than he is. They receive of the soul as he also 
receives, but they more. Nature enhances her 
beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their 
belief that the poet is beholding her shows at 
the same time. He is isolated among his con- 
temporaries, by truth and by his art, but with 
this consolation in his pursuits, that they will 
draw all men sooner or later. For all men live 
by truth, and stand in need of expression. In 
love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in 
games, we study to utter our painful secret. 
The man is only half himself, the other half is 
his expression. 

Notwithstanding this necessity to be pub- 
lished, adequate expression is rare. I know 
not how it is that we need an interpreter; but 
the great majority of men seem to be minors, 
who have not yet come into possession of their 



50 ESSAY in. 

own, or mutes, who cannot report the conver- 
sation they have had with nature. There is 
no man who does not anticipate a snpersensual 
utility in the sun, and stars, earth and water. 
These stand and wait to render him a peculiar 
service. But there is some obstruction, or 
some excess of phlegm in our constitution, 
which does not suffer them to yield the due 
effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of na- 
ture on us to make us artists. Every touch 
should thrill. Every man should be so much 
an artist, that he could report in conversation 
what had befallen him. Yet, in our experi- 
ence, the rays or appulses have sufficient force 
to arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach 
the quick, and compel the reproduction of 
themselves in speech. The poet is the person 
in whom these powers are in balance, the man 
without impediment, who sees and handles that 
which others dream of, traverses the whole 
scale of experience, and is representative of 
man, in virtue of being the largest power to 
receive and to impart. 

For the Universe has three children, born at 
one time, which reappear, under different 
names, in every system of thought, whether 
they be called cause, operation, and effect ; or, 
more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune, or, the- 



S^ 



THE POET. 61 

ologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son ; 
but which we will call here, the Knower, the 
Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively 
for the love of truth, for the love of good, and 
for the love of beauty. These three are equal. 
Each is that which he is essentially, so that he 
cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and each 
of these three has the power of the others lat- 
ent in him, and his own patent. 

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and repre- 
sents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands 
on the center. For the world is not painted, 
or adorned, but is from the beginning beauti- 
ful ; and God has not made some beautiful 
things, but Beauty is the creator of the uni- 
verse. Therefore, the poet is not any permis- 
sive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. 
Criticism is infested with a cant of material- 
ism, which assumes that manual skill and activ- 
ity is the first merit of all men, and disparages 
such as say and do not, overlooking the fact 
that some men, namely, poets, are natural say- 
ers, sent into the world to the end of expres- 
sion, and confounds them with those whose 
province is action, but who quit it, to imitate 
the sayers. But Homer's words are as costly 
and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's 
victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does 



52 ESSAY III. 

not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they 
act and think primarily, so he writes primarily 
what will and must be spoken, reckoning the 
others, though primaries also, yet, in respect 
to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or 
models in the studio of a painter, or as assist- 
ants who bring building materials to an arch- 
itect. 

For poetry was all written before time was, 
and whenever we are so finely organized that 
we can penetrate into that region where the air 
is music, we hear those primal warblings, and 
attempt to write them down, but we lose ever 
and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute 
something of our own, and thus miswrite the 
poem. The men of more delicate ear write 
down these cadences more faithfully, and 
these transcripts, though imperfect, become 
the songs of the nations. For nature is as 
truly beautiful as it is good or as it is reason- 
able, and must as much appear, as it must be 
done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite 
indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words 
are also actions, and actions are a kind of 
words. 

The sign and credentials of the poet are, 
that he announces that which no man foretold. 
He is the true and only doctor; he knows and 



THE POET. 53 

tells ; he is the only teller of news, for he was 
present and privy to the appearance which he 
describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an 
ntterer of the necessary and casual. For we 
do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or 
of industry and skill in meter, but of the true 
poet. I took part in a conversation the other 
day, concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a 
man of subtle mind, whose head appeared to 
be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, 
and whose skill, and command of language we 
could not sufficiently praise. But when the 
question arose, whether he was not only a lyr- 
ist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that 
he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal 
man. He does not stand out of our low limi- 
tations, like a Chimborazo under the line, run- 
ning up from the torrid base through all the 
climates of the globe, with belts of the herb- 
age of every latitude on its high and mottled 
sides; but this genius is the landscape-garden 
of a modern house, adorned with fountains 
and statues, with well-bred men and women 
standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. 
We hear, through all the varied music, the 
ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets 
are men of talents who sing, and not the chil- 



54 ESSAY III. 

dren of music. The argument is secondary, 
the finish of the verses is primary. 

For it is not meters, but a meter-making 
argument, that makes a poem, — a thought so 
passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a 
plan or an animal, it has an architecture of its 
own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The 
thought and the form are equal in the order 
of time, but in the order of genesis the thought 
is prior to the form. The poet has a new 
thought : he has a whole new experience to un- 
fold ; he will tell us how it was with him, and 
all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, 
the experience of each new age requires a new 
confession, and the world seems always wait- 
ing for its poet. I remember, when I was 
young, how much I was moved one morning 
by tidings that genius had appeared in a youth 
who sat near me at table. He had left his 
work, and gone rambling none knew whither, 
and had written hundreds of lines, but could 
not tell whether that which was in him was 
therein told: he could tell nothing but that all 
was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and 
sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! 
Society seemed to be compromised. We sat in 
the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out 
all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice 



THE POET. 55 

the distance it had the night before, or was 
much farther than that. Rome, — what was 
Rome? Plutarch and Shakespeare were in the 
yellow leaf, and Homer . no more should be 
heard of. It is much to know that poetry has 
been written this very day, under this very 
roof, by your side. What! that wonderful 
spirit has not expired! these stony moments 
are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied 
that the oracles were all silent, and nature had 
spent her fires, and behold! all night, from 
every pore, these fine auroras have been 
streaming. Every one has some interest in the 
advent of the poet, and no one knows how 
much it may concern him. We know that the 
secret of the world is profound, but who or 
what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A 
mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new 
person may put the key into our hands. Of 
course, the value of genius to us is in the va- 
racity of its report. Talent may frolic and 
juggle; genius realizes and adds. Mankind, 
in good earnest, have availed so far in under- 
standing themselves and their work, that the 
foremost watchman on the peak announces his 
news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and 
the phrase will be the fittest, most musical, 



56 ESSAY III. 

and the unerring voice of the world for that 
time. 

All that we call sacred history attests that 
the birth of a poet is the principal event in 
chronology. Man, never so often deceived, 
still watches for the arrival of a brother who 
can hold him steady to a truth, until he has 
made it his own. With what joy I begin to 
read a poem, which I confide in as an inspira- 
tion ! And now my chains are to be broken ; I 
shall mount above these clouds and opaque 
airs in which I live, — opaque, though they 
seem transparent, — and from the heaven of 
truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. 
That will reconcile me to life, and renovate 
nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, 
and to know what I am doing. Life will no 
more be a noise ; now I shall see men and wo- 
men, and know the signs by which they may 
be discerned from fools and satans. This day 
shall be better than my birthday; then I be- 
came an animal ; now I am invited into the sci- 
ence of the real. Such is the hope, but the 
fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls, that 
this winged man, who will carry me into the 
heaven, whirls me into the clouds, then leaps 
and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, 
still affirming that he is bound heavenward; 



THE POET. 57 

and I, being myself a novice, am slow in per- 
ceiving that he does not know the way into the 
heavens, and is merely bent that I should ad- 
mire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying 
fish, a little way from the ground or the 
water; but the all-piercing, all-feeding, and 
ocular air of heaven, that man shall never in- 
habit. I tumble down again soon into my old 
nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as be- 
fore, and have lost my faith in the possibility 
of any guide who can lead me thither where I 
would be. 

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, 
with new hope, observe how nature, by wor- 
thier impulses, has insured the poet*s fidelity to 
his office of announcement and affirming, 
namely, by the beauty of things which becomes 
a new, and higher beauty, when expressed. 
Nature offers all her creatures to him as a pic- 
ture language. Being used as a type, a second 
wonderful value appears in the object, far bet- 
ter than its old value, as the carpenter's 
stretched cord, if you hold your ear close 
enough, is musical in the breeze. *' Things 
more excellent than every image,'* says Jam- 
blichus, "are expressed through images." 
Things admit of being used as symbols, be. 
cause nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in 



58 ESSAY III. 

every part. Every line we can draw in the 
sand has expression; and there is no body 
without its spirit or genius. All form is an 
effect of character; all condition, of the qual- 
ity of the life; all harmony, of health; (and, 
for this reason, a perception of beauty should 
be sympathetic, or proper only to the good). 
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the 
necessary. The soul makes the body, as the 
wise Spencer teaches: 

*'So every spirit, as it is most pure, 

And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 

So it the fairer body doth procure 

To habit in, and it more fairly dight, 

With cheerful grace and amiable sight, 

For, of the soul, the body form doth take, 

For soul is form, and doth the body make.'* 

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a crit- 
ical speculation, but in a holy place, and should 
go very warily and reverently. We stand be- 
fore the secret of the world, there where Being 
passes into Appearance, and Unity into Vari- 
ety. 

The Universe is the externization of the 
soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into 
appearance around it. Our science is sensual, 
and, therefore, superficial. The earth, and 
the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, 



THE POET. 69 

we sensually treat, as if they were self-exis- 
tent; but these are the retinue of that Being 
we have. *'The mighty heaven, " said Proc- 
lus, ** exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear 
images of the splendor of intellectual percep- 
tions; being moved in conjunction with the 
unapparent periods of intellectual natures/' 
Therefore, science always goes abreast with 
the just elevation of the man, keeping step 
with religion and metaphysics ; or, the state of 
science is an index of our self-knowledge. 
Since everything in nature answers to a moral 
power, if any phenomenon remains brute and 
dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in 
the observer is not yet active. 

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, 
that we hover over them with a religious re- 
gard. The beauty of the fable proves the im- 
portance of the sense; to the poet, and to all 
others ; or, if you please, every man is so far 
a poet as to be susceptible of these enchant- 
ments of nature ; for all men have the thoughts 
whereof the universe is the celebration. I 
find that the fascination resides in the symbol. 
Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only 
poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who 
live with her? No; but also hunters, farmers^ 
grooms, and butchers, though they express 



60 ESSAY III. 

their affection in their choice of life, and not 
in their choice of words. The writer wonders 
what the coachman or the hunter values in 
riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not super- 
ficial qualities. When you talk with him, he 
holds these at as slight a rate as you. His 
worship is sympathetic; has no definitions, 
but he is commanded in nature, by the living 
power which he feels to be there present. No 
imitation, or playing of these things, would 
content him ; he loves the earnest of the north 
wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. 
A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty 
which we can see to the end of. It is nature 
the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, 
body overflowed by life, which he worships, 
with coarse, but sincere rites. 

The inwardness, and mystery, of this attach- 
ment drives men of every class to the use of 
emblems. The schools of poets, and philoso- 
phers, are not more intoxicated with their sym- 
bols than the populace with theirs. In our 
political parties, compute the power of badges 
and emblems. See the great ball which they 
roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill ! In the 
political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, 
and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Wit- 
ness the cider barrel, the log cabin, the hickory 



THE POET. 61 

Stick, the palmelto, and all the cognizances of 
party. See the power of national emblems. 
Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, 
an eagle, or other figure, which came into 
credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunt- 
ing, blowing in the wind, or a fort, at the ends 
of the earth, shall make the blood tingle tinder 
the rudest, or the most conventional exterior. 
The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are 
all poets and mystics ! 

Beyond this universality of the symbolic lan- 
guage, we are apprised^f the divineness of this 
superior use of things, whereby the world is a 
temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, 
pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in 
this, that there is no fact in nature which does 
not carry the whole sense of nature; and the 
distinction which we make in events, and in 
affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disap- 
pear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought 
makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary 
of an omniscient man would embrace words 
and images excluded from polite conversation. 
What would be base, or even obscene, to the 
obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new 
connection of thought. The piety of the 
Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The 
circumcision is an example of the power of 



62 ESSAY III. 

poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small 
and mean things serve as well as great sym- 
bols. The meaner the type by which a law is 
expressed, the more pungent it is, and the 
more lasting in the memories of men: just as 
we choose the smallest box, or case, in which 
any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists 
of words are found suggestive, to an imagina- 
tive and excited mind ; as it is related of Lord 
Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in 
Bailey's Dictionary, when he was preparing to 
speak in Parliament. The poorest experience 
is rich enough for all he purposes of expressing 
thought. Why covet a knowledge of new 
facts? Day and night, house and garden, a 
few books, a few actions, serve us as well as 
would all trades and all spectacles. We are 
far from having exhausted the significance of 
the few symbols we use. We can come to use 
them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does 
not need that a poem should be long. Every 
word was once a poem. Every new relation 
is a new word. Also, we use defects and de- 
formities to a sacred purpose, so expressing 
our sense that the evils of the world are such 
only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, 
mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to 
divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blind- 



THE POET. 63 

ness to Cupid, and the like, to signify exuber- 
ances. 

For as it is dislocation and detachment from 
the life of God, that makes things ugly, the 
poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the 
Whole, — re-attaching even artificial things, 
and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper 
insight, — disposes very easily of the most dis- 
agreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the fac- 
tory village and the railway, and fancy that the 
poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; 
for these works of art are not yet consecrated 
in their reading; but the poet sees them fall 
within the great Order not less than the bee 
hive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature 
adopts them very fast into her vital circles, 
and the gliding train of cars she loves like her 
own. Besides, in a centered mind, it signifies 
nothing how many mechanical inventions you 
exhibit. Though you add millions, and never 
so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not 
gained a grain's weight. The spiritual fact 
remains unalterable, by many or by few partic- 
ulars; as no mountain is of any appreciable 
height to break the curve of the sphere. A 
shrewd country boy goes to the city for the 
first time, and the complacent citizen is not 
satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that 



64 ESSAY III. 

he does not see all the fine houses, and know 
that he never saw such before, but he disposes 
of them as easily as the poet finds place for the 
railway. The chief value of the new fact, is 
to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, 
which can dwarf any and every circumstance, 
and to which the belt of wampum, and the 
commerce of America, are alike. 

The world being thus put under the mind 
for verb and noun, the poet is he who can ar- 
ticulate it. For, though life is great, and fas- 
cinates, and absorbs, — and though all men are 
intelligent of the symbols through which it is 
named, — yet they cannot originally use them. 
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols; work- 
men, work, and tools, words and things, birth 
and death, all are emblems; and we sympa- 
thize with the symbols, and, being infatuated 
with the economical uses of things, we do not 
know that they are thoughts. The poet, by 
an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them 
a power which makes their old use forgotten, 
and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb 
and inanimate object. He perceives the inde- 
pendence of the thought on the symbol, the 
stability of the thought, the accidency and 
fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyn- 
cseus were said to see through the earth, so the 



&te 




"The poor shepherd who perishes in a drift."— Page 77. 

Emerson's Essays.— Vol. II. 



THE POET. 65 

poet turns the world to glass, and shows us 
all things in their right series and processions. 
For, through that better perception, he stands 
one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing 
or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is 
multiform ; that within the form of every crea- 
ture is a force impelling it to ascend into a 
higher form ; and, following with his eyes the 
life, uses the forms which express that life, 
and so his speech flows with the flowing of na- 
ture. All the facts of the animal economy, 
sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are 
symbols of the passage of the world into the 
soul of man, to suffer there a change, and re- 
appear a new and higher fact. He uses forms 
according to the life, and not according to the 
form. This is true science. The poet alone 
knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and 
animation, for he does not stop at these facts, 
but employs them as signs. He knows why 
the plain, or meadow of space, was strewn with 
these flowers we call suns, and moons, and 
stars ; why the great deep is adorned with ani- 
mals, with men, and gods; for, in every word 
he speaks he rides on them as the horses of 
thought. 

By virtue of this science the poet is the 
Namer, or Language-maker, naming things 

5 



^^ 



66 ESSAY III. 

sometimes after their appearance, sometimes 
after their essence, and giving to every one its 
own name, and not another's, thereby rejoic- 
ing the intellec;^^ which delights in detachment 
or boundary. The poet made all the words, 
and, therefore, language is the archives of his- 
tory, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of 
the muses. For, though the origin of most 
of our words is forgotten, each word was at 
first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, 
because for the moment it symbolized the 
world to the first speak and to the hearer. The 
etymologist finds the deadest word to have 
been once a brilliant picture. Language is 
fossil poetry. As the limestone of the conti- 
nent consists of infinite masses of the shells of 
animalcules, so language is made up of images, 
or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, 
have long ceased to remind us of their poetic 
origin. But the poet names the thing because 
he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than 
any other. This expression, or naming, is not 
art, but a second nature, grown out of the 
first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we. call na- 
ture is a certain self -regulated motion, or 
change ; and nature does all things by her own 
hands, and does not leave another to baptize 
her, but baptizes herself; and this through the 



THE POET. 67 

metamorphosis again. I remember that a cer- 
tain poet described it to me thus : 

Genius is the activity which repairs the 
decays of things, whether wholly or partly of 
a material and finite kind. Nature, through 
all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody 
cares for planting the poor fungus: so she 
shakes down from the gills of one agaric count- 
less spores, any one of which, being preserved, 
transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or 
next day. The new agaric of this hour has a 
chance which the old one had not. This atom 
of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject 
to the accidents which destroyed its parent two 
rods off. She makes a man; and having 
brought him to ripe age, she will no longer 
run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, 
but she detaches from him a new self, that the 
kind may be safe from accidents to which the 
individual is exposed. So when the soul of 
the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she 
detaches and sends away from it its poems or 
songs, — a fearless, sleepless, deathless pro- 
geny, which is not exposed to the accidents of 
the weary kingdom of time : a fearless, viva, 
cious offspring, clad with wings (such was the 
virtue of the soul out of which they came), 
which carry them fast and far, and infix them 



€8 ESSAY III. 

irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These 
wings are the beauty of the poet^s soul. The 
songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal 
parent, by clamorous flights of censures, 
which swarm in far greater numbers and, 
threaten to devour them ; but these last are 
not winged. At the end of a very short leap 
they fall plump down, and rot, having received 
from the souls out of which they came no 
beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet 
ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of 
infinite time. 

So far the bard taught me, using his freer 
speech. But nature has a higher end, in the 
production of new individuals, than security, 
namely, ascension, or, the passage of the soul 
into higher forms. I knew, in my younger 
days, the sculptor who made the statue of the 
youth which stands in the public garden. He 
was, as I remember, unable to tell, directly, 
what made him happy, or unhappy, but by 
wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose 
one day, according to his habit, before the 
dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as 
the eternity out of which it came, and, for 
many days after, he strove to express this 
tranquillity, and, lo! his chisel had fashioned 
out of marble the form of a beautiful youth, 



THE POET. 69 

Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is 
said, all persons who look on it become silent. 
The poet also resigns himself of his mood, and 
that thought which agitated him is expressed, 
but idem alter, in a manner totally new. The 
expression is organic, or, the new type which 
things themselves take when liberated. As, 
in the sun, objects paint their images on the 
retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspira- 
tion of the whole universe, tend to paint a far 
more delicate copy of their essence in his 
mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into 
higher organic forms, is their change into mel- 
odies. Over everything stands its daemon, or 
soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected 
by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected 
by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, 
Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or 
super-exist in pre-cantations, which sail like 
odors in the air, and when any man goes by with 
an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them, and 
endeavors to write down the notes, without 
diluting or depravinof them. And herein is 
the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's 
faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of 
some text in nature, with which they ought to 
be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our 
sonnets should not be less pleasing than the 



70 ESSAY III. 

iterated nodes of a sea- shell, or the resembling 
difference of a group of flowers. The pairing 
of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls 
are ; a tempest is a rough ode without false- 
hood or rant ; a summer, with its harvest sown, 
reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinat- 
ing how many admirably executed parts. 
Why should not the symmetry and truth that 
modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we 
participate the invention of nature. 

This insight, which expresses itself by what 
is called Imagination, is a very high sort of 
seeing, which does not come by study, but by 
the intellect being where and what it sees, by 
sharing the path, or circuit of things through 
forms, and so making them translucid to 
others. The path of things is silent. Will 
they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy 
they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the 
transcendency of their own nature, — him they 
will suffer. The condition of true naming, on 
the poet's part, is resigning himself to the 
divine aura which breathes through forms, and 
accompanying that. 

It is a secret which every intellectual man 
quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his 
possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable 
of a new energy (as of an inte lect doubled on 



THE POET. 71 

itself), by abandonment to the nature of 
things; that, besides his privacy of power as 
an individual man, there is a great public 
power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at 
all risks, his human doors, and suffering the 
ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him : 
then he is caught up into the life of the Uni- 
verse, his speech is thunder, his thought is 
law, and his words are universally intelligible 
as the plants and animals. The poet knows 
that he speaks adequately, then, on]y when he 
speaks somewhat wildly, or, ' Vith the flower 
of the mind;** not with the intellect, used as 
an organ, but with the intellect released from 
all service, and suffered to take its direction 
from its celestial life ; or, as the ancients were 
wont to express themselves, not with intellect 
alone, but with the intellect inebriated by 
nectar. As the traveler who has lost his way, 
throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts 
to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so 
must we do with the divine animal who carries 
us through this world. For if in any manner 
we can stimulate this instinct, new passages 
are opened for us into nature, the mind flows 
into and through things hardest and highest, 
and the metamorphosis is possible. 

This is the reason why bards love wine 



72 ESSAY III. 

mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes 
of sandal wood, and tobacco, or whatever other 
species of animal exhilaration. All men avail 
themselves of such means as they can, to add 
this extraordinary power to their normal 
powers; and to this end they prize conversa- 
tion, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, 
theatres, traveling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, 
politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxica- 
tion, which are several coarser or finer quasi- 
mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, 
which is the ravishment of the intellect by 
coming nearer to the fact. These are auxili- 
aries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to 
his passage out into free space, and they help 
him to escape the custody of that body in 
which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of 
individual relations in which he is enclosed. 
Hence a great number of such as were profes- 
sionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, 
poets, musicians, and actors, have been more 
than others wont to lead a life of pleasure and 
indulgence ; all but the few who received the 
true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of 
attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation 
not into the heavens, but into the freedom of 
baser places, they were punished for that ad- 
vantage they won, by a dissipation and deteri- 



THE POET. 73 

oration. But never can any advantage be 
taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the 
world, the great calm presence of the creator, 
comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of 
wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure 
and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. 
That is not an inspiration which we owe to 
narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and 
fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may 
drink wine and live generously, but the epic 
poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their 
descent unto men, must drink water out of a 
wooden bowl. For poetry is not * 'Devil's 
wine,'' but God's wine. It is with this as it is / 
with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries of > 
our children with all manner of dolls, drums, 
and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the 
plain face and suffering objects of nature, the 
sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and 
stones, which should be their toys. So the 
poet's habit of living should be set on a key so 
low and plain, that the common influences 
should delight him. His cheerfulness should 
be the gift of the sunlight ; the air should suffice 
for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with 
water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, 
which seems to come forth to such from every 
dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, 



74 ESSAY III. 

and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull 
March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and 
hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou 
fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with 
fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate 
thy jaded senses with wine and French coffee, 
thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the 
lonely waste of the pine woods. 

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is* 
not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis 
excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. 
The use of smybols has a certain power of 
emancipation and exhilaration for all men. 
We seem to be touched by a wand, which 
makes us dance and run about happily, like 
children. We are like persons who come out 
of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is 
the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and 
all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating 
gods. Men have really got a new sense, and 
found within the world, another world, or nest 
of worlds ; for, the metamorphosis once seen, 
we divine that it does not stop. I will not 
now consider how much this makes the charm 
of algebra and the mathematics, which also 
have their tropes, but it is felt in every defini- 
tion; as, when Aristotle defines space to be an 
immovable vessel, in which things are con- 



THE POET. 75 

tained; — or, when Plato defines a line to be a 
flowing point ; or, figure to be a bound of solid ; 
and many the like. What a joyful sense of 
freedom we have, when Vitruvius announces 
the old opinion of artists, that no architect can 
build any house well, who does not know some- 
thing of anatomy. When Socrates, in Char- 
mides, tells us that the soul is cured of its mal- 
adies by certain incantations, and that these 
incantations are beautiful reasons, from which 
temperance is generated in souls; when Plato 
calls the world an animal ; and Timseus affirms 
that the plants also are animals ; or affirms a 
man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his 
root, which is his head, upward ; and, as George 
Chapman, following him, writes,^ — 

"So in our tree of man, whose nervie root 
Springs in his top;'* 

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as **that 
white flower which marks extreme old age;'* 
when Proclus calls the universe the statue of 
the intellect ; when Chaucer, in his praise of 
**Gentilesse,'* compares good blood m mean 
condition to fire, which, though carried to the 
darkest house betwixt this and the mount of 
Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, arid 
burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did 



76 ESSAY III. 

it behold ; when John saw, in the apocalypse, 
the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars 
fall from heaven, as the fig tree casteth her 
untimely fruit; when ^sop reports the whole 
catalogue of common daily relations through 
the masquerade of birds and beasts;— we take 
the cheerful hint of the immortality of our 
essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, as 
when the gypsies say, **it is in vain to hang 
them, they cannot die. * ' 

The poets are thus liberating gods. The 
ancient British bards had for the title of their 
order, **Those who are free throughout the 
world.'* They are free, and they make free. 
An imaginative book renders us much more 
service at first, by stimulating us through its 
tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the 
precise sense of the author. I think nothing 
is of any value in books, excepting the trans- 
cendental and extraordinary. If a man is 
inflamed and carried away by his thought, to 
that degree that he forgets the authors and the 
public, and heeds only this one ream, which 
holds him like an insanity let me read his 
paper, and 3^ou may have all the arguments 
and histories and criticism. All the value 
which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, 
Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Sweden- 



THE POET. 77 

borg, Schilling, Oken, or any other who intro- 
duces questionable facts into his cosmogony, 
as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, 
mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we 
have of departure from routine, and that here 
is a new witness. That also is the best success 
in conversation, the magic of liberty, which 
puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How 
cheap even the liberty then seems ; how mean 
to study, when an emotion communicates to 
the intellect the power to sap and upheave 
nature; how great the perspective! nations, 
times, systems, enter and disappear, like 
threads in tapestry of large figure and many 
colors ; dream delivers us to dream, and, while 
the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, 
our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence. 
There is good reason why we should prize 
this liberation. / The fate of the poor shepherd, 
who blinded and lost in the snow-storm, per- 
ishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage 
door, is an emblem of the state of man. On 
the brink of the waters of life and truth, we ^/ 
are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness of ' 
every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. 
What if you come near to it. — you are as 
remote, when you are nearest, as when you 
are farthest. Every thought is also a prison ; " 



78 ESSAY III. 

every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we 
love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, 
whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks 
and behavior, has yielded ns a new thought. 
He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new 
scene. 

This emancipation is dear to all men, and 
the power to impart it, as it must come from 
greater depth and scope of thought, is a meas- 
ure of intellect. Therefore all books of the 
imagination endure, all which ascend to that 
truth, that the writer sees nature beneath him, 
and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or 
sentence, possessing this virtue, will take care 
of its own immortality. The religions of the 
world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative 
men. 

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, 
and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at 
the color, or the form, but read their meaning; 
neither may he rest in this meaning, but he 
makes the same objects exponents of his new 
thought. Here is the difference betwixt the 
poet and the mystic, that the last nails a sym- 
bol to one sense, which was a true sense for a 
moment, but soon becomes old and false. For 
all symbols are fluxional; all language is 
vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries 



THE POET. 79 

and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms 
and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism 
consists in the mistake of an accidental and 
individual symbol for an universal one. The 
morning redness happens to be the favorite 
meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes 
to stand to him for truth and faith; and he 
believes should stand for the same realities to 
every reader. But the first reader prefers as 
naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or 
a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweler polishing 
a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, 
are equally good to the person to whom they 
are significant. Only they must be held 
lightly, and be very willingly translated into 
the equivalent terms which others use. And 
the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you 
say is just as true without the tedious use of 
that symbol as with it. Let us have a little 
algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — uni- 
versal signs, instead of these village symbols, 
— and we shall both be gainers. The history 
of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious 
error consisted in making the symbol to stark 
and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess 
of the organ of language. 

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, 
stands eminently for the translator of nature 



80 ESSAY III. 

into thought. I do not know the man in his- 
tory to whom things stood so uniformly for 
words. Before him the metamorphosis con- 
tinually plays. Everything on which his eye 
rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. 
The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. 
When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the 
laurel twig which they held blossomed in their 
hands. The noise which, at a distance, 
appeared like gnashing and thumping, on com- 
ing nearer was found to be the voice of dis- 
putants. The men, in one of his visions, seen 
in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and 
seemed in darkness; but, to each other, they 
appeared as men, and, when the light from 
heaven shone into their cabin, they complained 
of the darkness, and were compelled to shut 
the window that they might see. 

There was this perception in him, which 
makes the poet or seer an object of awe and 
terror, namely, that the same man, or society 
of men, may wear one aspect to themselves and 
their companions, and a different aspect to 
higher intelligences. Certain priests, whom 
he describes as conversing very learnedly 
together, appeared to the children, who were 
at some distance, like dead horses: and many 
the like misappearances. And instantly the 



THE POET. 81 

mind inquires, whether these fishes tinder the 
bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs 
in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and 
dogs, or only so appear to me, and perchance 
to themselves appear upright men; and 
whether I appear as a man to all eyes. The 
Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same 
question, and if any poet has witnessed the 
transformation, he doubtless found it in har- 
mony with various experiences. We have all 
seen changes as considerable in wheat and cat- 
erpillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us 
with love and terror, who sees, through the 
flowing vest, the firm nature, and can declare 
it. 

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. 
We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufl&- 
cient profoundness, address ourselves to life nor 
dare we chaunt our own times and social cir- 
cumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, 
we should not shrink from celebrating it. 
Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not 
yet the timely man, the new religion, the 
reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's 
praise is, that he dared to write his autobi- 
ography in colossal cipher, or into universality. 
We have yet had no genius in America, with 
tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our 

6 



82 ESSAY III. 

incomparable materials, and saw, in the bar- 
barism and materialism of the times, another 
carnival of the same gods whose picture he so 
much admires in Homer; then in the middle 
age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, 
the newspaper and caucus, methodism and 
unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, 
but rest on the same foundations of wonder as 
the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, 
and are as swiftly passing away. Our log-rol- 
ling, our stumps and their politics, our fisher- 
ies, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and 
our repudiations, the wrath of rogiaes, and the 
pusillanimity of honest men, the northern 
trade, the southern planting, the western clear- 
ing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet 
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample 
geography dazzles the imagination, and it will 
not wait long for meters. If I have not found 
that excellent combination of gifts in my coun- 
trymen which I seek, neither could I aid 
myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading 
now and then in Chalmer's collection of five 
centuries of English poets. These are wits, 
more than poets, though there have been 
poets among them. But when we ad- 
here to the ideal of the poet, we have our 
difficulties even with Milton and Homer. 



THE POET. 83 

Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal 
and historical. 

But I am not wise enough for a national crit- 
icism, and must use the old largeness a little 
longer, to discharge my errand from the muse 
to the poet concerning his art. 

Art is the path of the creator to his work. 
The paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, 
though few men ever see them, not the artist 
himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he 
come into the conditions. The painter, the 
sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, 
the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to 
express themselves symmetrically and abund- 
antly not dwarfishly and fragmentaril)^ They 
find or put themselves in certain conditions, 
as the painter and sculptor before some 
impressive human figures ; the orator, into the 
assembly of the people, and the others, in 
such scenes as each has found exciting to his 
intellect; and each presently feels the new 
desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. 
Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds 
of demons hem him in. He can no more rest; 
he says, with the old painter, *'By God, it is 
in me, and must go forth of me. " He pursues 
a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. 
The poet pours out verses in every solitude. 



84 ESSAY III 

Most of the things he says are conventional, 
no doubt ; but by and by he says something 
which is original and beautiful. That charms 
him. He would say nothing else but such 
things. In our way of talking, we say, That 
is yours, this is mine ; but the poet knows well 
that it is not his; that it is as strange and 
beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear 
the like eloquence at length. Once having 
tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have 
enough of it, and, as an admirable creative 
power exists in these intellections, it is of the 
last importance that these things get spoken. 
What a little of all we know is said ! What 
drops of all the sea of our science are baled up ! 
and by what accident is it that these are 
exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature ! 
Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence 
these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, 
at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, 
that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or 
Word. 

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, *'It is 
in me, and shall out/* Stand there, balked 
and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed 
and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, 
rage draws out of thee that dream-power 
which every night shows thee is thine own ; a 



THE POET. 85 

power transcending all limit and privacy, and 
by virtue of which a man is the conductor of 
the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, 
or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not 
in turn arise and walk before him as exponent 
of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his 
genius is no longer exhaustible. All the crea- 
tures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his 
mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again 
to people a new world. This is like the stock 
of air for our respiration, or for the combustion 
of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but 
the entire atmosphere if wanted. And there- 
fore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shake- 
speare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits 
to their works, except the limits of their life- 
time, and resemble a mirror carried through 
the street, ready to render an image of every 
created thing. 

O poet ! a new nobility is conferred in groves 
and pastures, and not in castles, or by the 
sword-blade, any longer. The conditions are 
hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the 
world, and know the must only. Thou shalt 
not know any longer the times, customs, 
graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt 
take all from the muse. For the time of 
towns is tolled from the world by funeral 



86 ESSAY III. 

chimes, but in nature the universal hours are 
counted by succeeding tribes of animals and 
plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God 
wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and 
duplex life, and that thou be content that 
others speak for thee. Others shall be thy 
gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy and 
worldly life for thee; others shall do the great 
and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie 
close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded 
to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is 
full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and 
this is thine : thou must pass for a fool and a 
churl for a long season. This is the screen 
and sheath in which Pan has protected his well 
beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only 
to thine own, and they shall console thee with 
tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to 
rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, 
for an old shame before the holy ideal. And 
this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real 
to thee, and the impressions of the actual world 
shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not 
troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. 
Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park 
and manor, the sea for thy bath and naviga- 
tion, without tax and without envy; the woods 
and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt 



THE POET. 87 

possess that wherein others are only tenants 
and boarders. Thou true land-lord ! sea-lord ! 
air-lord! Wherever snow falls, or water 
flows, or birds fly, wherever day and 
night meet in twilight, wherever the blue 
heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with 
stars, wherever are forms with trans- 
parent boundaries, wherever are outlets 
into celestial space, wherever is danger, and 
awe, and love, there is Beauty plenteous as 
rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst 
walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to 
find a condition inopportune or ignoble. 



ESSAY IV- 



EXPERIENCE. 

Where do we find ourselves? In a series 
of which we do not know the extremes, and 
believe that it has none. We wake and find 
ourselves on a stair ; there are stairs below us, 
which we seem to have ascended ; there are 
stairs above us, many a one, which go upward 
and out of sight. But the Genius which, 
according to the old belief, stands at the door 
by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to 
drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the 
cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the 
lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all 
our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers 
all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All 
things swim and glitter. Our life is not so 
much threatened as our perception. Ghost- 
like we glide through nature, and should not 
know our place again. Did our birth fall in 
some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, 
that she was so sparing of her fire and so 
liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that 

88 



EXPERIENCE. 89 

we lack the affirmative principle, and though 
we have health and reason, yet we have no 
superfluity of spirit for new creation? We 
have enough to live and bring the year about, 
but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah, 
that our Genius were a little more of the 
genius! We are like millers on the lower 
levels of a stream, when the factories above 
them have exhausted the water. We too fancy 
that the upper people have raised their dams. 
If any of its knew what we were doing, or 
where we are going, then when we think we 
best know! We do not know to-day whether" 
we are busy or idle. In times when we / 
thought ourselves indolent, we have after- 
wards discovered, that much was accom- 
plished, and much was begun in us. All our 
days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 
'tis wonderful where or when we ever got any- 
thing of this which we call wisdom, poetry, 
virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar 
day. Some heavenly days must have been 
intercalated somewhere, like those that 
Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that 
Osiris might be born. It is said, all martyr- ■ 
dom looked mean when they were suffered. 
Every ship is a romantic object, except that 
we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits 



90 ESSAY IV. 

our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in 
the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we 
shun to record it. Men seem to have learned 
of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating 
and reference. ** Yonder uplands are rich 
pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile 
meadow, but my field," says the querulous 
farmer, '*only holds the world together." I 
quote another man's saying; unluckily that 
other withdraws himself in the same way, 
and quotes me, *' *Tis the trick of nature 
thus to degrade to-day ; a good deal of buzz, and 
somewhere a result slipped magically in. 
Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is 
lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning 
women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges 
of lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the news?' 
as if the old were so bad. How many indi- 
viduals can we count in society? how many 
actions? how many opinions? So much of our 
time is preparation, so much is routine, and so 
much retrospect, that the pith of each man's 
genius contracts itself to a very few hours. 
The history of literature — take the net result 
of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel, — is a sum 
of very few ideas, and of very few original 
tales, — all the rest being variations of these. 
So in this great society wide lying around us, 



sw^ 



EXPERIENCE. 91 

a critical analysis would find very few spon- 
taneous actions. It is almost all custom and 
gross sense. There are even few opinions, 
and these seem organic in the speakers, and 
do not disturb the universal necessity." 

What opium is instilled into all disaster ! It 
shows formidable as we approach it, but there 
is at least no rough rasping friction, but the 
most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall short 
on a thought. Ate Dea is gentle, 

** Over men's heads walking aloft, 
With tender feet treading so soft.'* 

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but 
it is not half so bad with them as they say. 
There are moods in which we court suffering, 
in the hope that here, at least, we shall find 
reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But 
it turns out to be scene-painting and counter- 
feit. The only thing grief has taught me, is 
to know how shallow it is. That, like all the 
rest, plays about the surface, and never intro- 
duces me into the reality, for contact with 
which, we would even pay the costly price of 
sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found 
out that bodies never come in contact? Well, 
souls never touch their objects. An innavig- 
able sea washes with silent waves between us 



(^•■' 



92 ESSAY IV. 

and the things we aim at and converse with. 
Grief too will make ns idealists. In the death 
of my son, now more than two years ago, I 
seem to have lost a beautiful estate, — no more. 
I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I 
should be informed of the bankruptcy of my 
principal debtors, the loss of my property 
would be a great inconvenience to me, per- 
haps, for many years; but it would leave me 
as it found me, — neither better nor worse. 
So is it with this calamity: it does not touch 
me: something which I fancied was a part of 
me, which could not be torn away without 
tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching 
me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It 
was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach 
; me nothing, nor carry me one step into real 
[nature. The Indian who was laid under a 
curse, that the wind should not blow on him, 
nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, 
is a type of us all. The dearest events are 
summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed 
every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. 
We look to that with a grim satisfaction, say- 
ing, there at least is reality that will not 
dodge us. 

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all 
objects, which lets them slip through our 



EXPERIENCE. 93 

fingers then when we clutch hardest to be the 
most unhandsome part of our condition. 
Nature does not like to be observed, and likes 
that we should be her fools and playmates. 
We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, 
but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct 
strokes she never gave us power to make ; all 
our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. 
Our relations to each other are oblique and 
casual. 

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no 
end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like^ 
a string of beads, and as we pass through 
them they prove to be many-colored lenses, 
which paint the world their own hue, an^ 
each shows only what lies in its focus. From 
the mountain you see the mountain. We 
animate what we can, and we see only what 
we animate. Nature and books belong to the *^ 
eyes that see them. It depends on the mood 
of the man, whether he shall see the sunset 
or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, / 
and there is always genius; but only a few 
hours so serene that we can relish nature or 
criticism. The more or less depends on struc- 
ture or temperament. Temperament is the 
iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of 
what use is fortune or talent to a cold and 



94 ESSAY IV. 

defective nature? Who cares what sensibility 
or discrimination a man has at some time 
shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he 
langh and giggle? or if he apologize? or is 
affected with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? 
think of or cannot go buy food? or has gotten 
a child in his boyhood? Of what use is genius, 
if the organ is too convex or too concave, and 
cannot find a focal distance within the actual 
horizon of human life? Of what use, if the brain 
is too cold or too hot, and the man does not care 
enough for results to stimulate him to experi- 
ment, and hold him up in it? or if the web is 
so finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and 
pain, so that life stagnates from too much 
reception, without due outlet? Of what use to 
make heroic vows of amendment, if the same 
old law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer 
can the religious sentiment yield, when that is 
suspected to be secretly dependent on the sea- 
sons of the year, and the state of the blood? I 
knew a witty physician who found theology in 
the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if 
there was disease in the liver, the man became 
a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he 
became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the 
reluctant experience that some unfriendly 
excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of 



EXPERIENCE. 95 

genius. We see young men who owe us a 
new world, so readily and lavishly they prom- 
ise, but they never acquit the debt ; they die 
young and dodge the account: or if they live, 
they lose themselves in the crowd. 

Temperament also enters fully into the 
system of illusions, and shuts us in a prison 
of glass which we cannot see. There is an 
optical illusion about every person we meet. 
In truth, they are all creatures of given tem- 
perament, which will appear in a given char- 
acter, whose boundaries they will never pass : 
but we look at them, they seem alive, and we 
presume there is impulse in them. In the 
momycnt it seems impulse ; in the year, in the 
lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform 
tune which the revolving barrel of the music- 
box must play. Men resist the conclusion in 
the morning, but adopt it as the evening 
v/ears on, that temper prevails over everything 
of time, place, and condition, and is incon- 
sumable in the flames of religion. Some modi- 
fications the moral sentiment avails to impose, 
but the individual texture holds its dominion, 
if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix 
the measure of activity and of enjoyment. 

I thus express the law as it is read from the 
platform of ordinary life, but must not leave 



96 ESSAY IV. 

it without noticing the capital exception. For 
temperament is a power which no man will- 
ingly hears any one praise but himself. On 
the platform of physics, we cannot resist the 
contracting influences of so-called science. 
Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I 
know the mental proclivity of physicians. I 
hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theo- 
retic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they 
esteem each man the victim of another, who 
winds him round his finger, by knowing the 
law of his being, and by such cheap sign- 
boards as the color of his beard, or the slope 
of his occiput, reads the inventory of his for- 
tunes and character. The grossest ignorance 
does not disgust like this impudent knowing- 
ness. The physicians say, they are not materi- 
alists; but they are: — Spirit is matter reduced 
to an extreme thinness : O so thin ! — But the 
definition of spiritual, should be that which is 
its own evidence. What notions do they 
attach to love ! what to religion ! One would 
not willingly pronounce these words in their 
hearing, and give them the occasion to pro- 
fane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who 
adapts his conversation to the form of the 
head of the man he talks with ! I had fancied 
that the value of life lay in its inscrutable pos- 



EXPERIENCE. 97 

sibilities; in the fact that I never know, in 
addressing myself to sTnew individual, what 
may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle 
in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet 
of my lord, whenever and in what disguise 
soever he shall appear. I know he is in the 
neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. 
Shall I preclude my future, by taking a high 
seat, and kindly adapting my conversation to 
the shape of heads? When I come to that, the 
doctors shall buy me for a cent. — *'But, sir, 
medical history ; the report to the Institute ; 
the proven facts!'' — I mistrust the facts and 
the inferences. Temperament is the veto or 
limitation-power in the constitution, very 
justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in 
the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar 
to original equity. When virtue is in pres- 
ence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its 
own level, or in view of nature, temperament 
is final. I see not, if one be once caught in 
this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for 
the man from the link of the chain of physi- 
cal necessity. Given such an embryo, such 
a history must follow. On this platform, one 
lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon 
come to suicide. But it is impossible that 
the creative power should exclude itself. Into 

7 



98 ESSAY IV. 

every intelligence there is a door which is 
never closed, through which the creator 
passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute 
truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, 
intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper 
of these high powers, we awake from intellec- 
tual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl 
it into its own hell, and cannot again contract 
ourselves to so base a state. 

The secret of the illusoriousness is in the 
necessity of a succession of moods or objects. 
Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage 
is quicksand. This onward trick of nature 
is too strong for us: Pero si muove. When, 
at night, I look at the moon and stars, I seem 
stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of 
the real draws us to permanence, but health 
of body consists in circulation, and sanity of 
mind in variety or facility of association. We 
need change of objects. Dedication to one 
thought is quickly odious. We house with the 
insane, and must humor them ; then conver- 
sation dies out. Once I took such delight in 
Montaigne, that I thought I should not need 
any other book ; before that in Shakespeare ; 
then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one 
time in Bacon ; afterward in Goethe ; even in 
Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of 



EXPERIENCE. 99 

them languidly, whilst I still cherish their 
genius. So with pictures; each will bear an 
emphasis of attention once, which it cannot 
retain, though we fain would continue to be 
pleased in that manner. How strongly I have 
felt of pictures, that when you have seen one 
well, you must take your leave of it ; you shall 
never see it again. I have had good lessons 
from pictures, which I have since seen with- 
out emotion or remark. A deduction must be 
made from the opinion, which even the w^se 
express of a new book or occurrence. Their 
opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and 
some vague guess at the new fact, but is 
nowise to be trusted as the lasting relation 
between that intellect and that thing. The 
child asks, "Mamma, why don't I like the 
story as well as when you told it me yester- 
day?'' Alas, child, it is even so with the 
oldest cherubim of knowledge. But will it 
answer thy question to say. Because thou wert 
born to a whole, and this story is a particular? 
The reason of the pain this discovery causes 
us (and we make it late in respect to works of 
art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy 
which murmurs from it in regard to persons, 
to friendship and love. 

That immobility and absence of elasticity 



100 ESSAY IV. 

which we find in the arts, we find with more 
pain in the artist. There is no power of 
expansion in men. Our friends early appear 
to ns as representatives of certain ideas, which 
they never pass or exceed. They stand on the 
brink of the ocean of thought and power, but 
they never take the single step that would 
bring them there. A man is like a bit of 
Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you 
turn it in your hand, until you come to a parti- 
cular angle ; then it shows deep and beautiful 
colors. There is no adaptation or universal 
applicability in men, but each has his special 
talent, and the mastery of successful men con- 
sists in adroitly keeping themselves where and 
when that turn shall be oftenest to be prac- 
ticed. We do what we must, and call it by 
the best names we can, and would fain have 
the praise of having intended the result which 
ensues. I cannot recall any form of men who 
is not superfluous sometimes. But is not this 
pitiful? Life is not worth the taking, to do 
tricks in. 

Of course, it needs the whole society, to give 
the symmetry we seek. The parti-colored 
wheel must revolve very fast to appear white. 
Something is learned too by conversing with 
so much folly and defect In fine, whoever 



EXPERIENCE. 101 

loses, we are always of the gaining party. 
Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. 
The plays of children are nonsense, but very 
educative nonsense. So it is with the largest 
and solemnest things, with commerce, govern- 
ment, church, marriage, and so with the 
history of every man's bread, and the ways 
by which he is to come by it. Like a bird 
which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually 
from bough to bough is the Power which 
abides in no man and in no woman, but for a 
moment speaks from this one, and for another 
moment from that one. 

But what help from these fineries or pedan- 
tries? What help from thought? Life is not 
dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have 
had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. 
Our young people have thouhgt and written 
much on labor and reform, and for all that 
they have written, neither the world nor 
themselves have got in a step. Intellectual 
tasting of life will not supersede muscular 
activity. If a man should consider the nicety 
of the passage of a piece of bread down his 
throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, 
the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest 
figures of young men and maidens, quite pow. 
erless and melancholv. It would not rake or 



102 ESSAY IV. 

pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a 
horse; and the men and maidens it left pale 
and hungry. A political orator wittily com- 
pared our party promises to western roads, 
which opened stately enough, with planted 
tree on either side, to tempt the traveler, but 
soon became narrow and narrower, and ended 
in a squirrel- track, and ran up a tree. So 
does culture with us; it ends in headache. 
Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to 
those, who a few months ago were dazzled 
with the splendor of the promise of the times. 
** There is now no longer any right course of 
action, nor any self-devotion left among the 
Iranis. '' Objections and criticism we have 
had our fill of There are objections to every 
course of life and action, and the practical 
wisdom infers an indiff erency, from the omn- 
ipresence of objection. The whole frame of 
thmgs preaches indiff erency. Do not craze 
yourself with thinking, but go about your 
business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or 
critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for the 
well-mixed people who can enjoy what they 
find, without question. Nature hates peeping, 
and our mothers speak her very sense when 
they say, '* Children, eat your victuals, and 
say no more of it.*' To fill the hour, — 



EXPERIENCE. 103 

that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no 
crevice for a repentance or approval. We live 
amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to 
skate well on them./ Under the oldest 
moldiest conventions, a man of native force 
prospers just as well as in the newest world, 
and that by skill of handling and treatment. 
He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a 
mixture of power and form, and will not bear 
the least excess of either. To finish the 
moment, to find the journey's end in every step 
of the road, to live the greatest number of 
good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of 
men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians, if 
you will, to say, that, the shortness of life 
considered, it is not worth caring whether for 
so short a duration we were sprawling in want, 
or sitting high. Since our office is with mo- 
ments, let us husband them. Five minutes of 
to-day are worth as much to me as five minutes 
in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and^ 
wise, and our own, to-day. Let us treat the^ 
men and women well : treat them as if they 
were real: perhaps they are. Men live in 
their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are 
too soft and tremulous for successful labor. 
It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast 
I know is a respect to the present hour. 



104 ESSAY IV. 

Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this ver- 
tigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever 
the firmer in the creed, that we should not 
postpone and refer and wish, but do broad 
justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal 
with, accepting our actual companions and 
circumstances, however humble or odious, as 
the mystic officials to whom the universe has 
delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these 
are mean and malignant, their contentment, 
which is the last victory of justice, is a more 
satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of 
poets and the casual sympathy of admirable 
persons. I think that however a thoughtful 
man may suffer from the defects and absurd- 
ities of his company, he cannot without any 
affectation deny to any set of men and women 
a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The 
coarse and frivolous have an instinct of superi- 
ority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor 
it in their blind capricious way with sincere 
homage. 

The fine young people despise life, but in 
me, and in such as with me are free from 
dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and 
solid good, it is a great excess of politeness to 
look scornful and to cry for company. I am 
grown by sympathy a little eager and senti- 



EXPERIENCE. 105 

mental, but leave me alone, and I should relish 
every hour and what it brought me, the pot- 
luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip 
in the bar-room. I am thankful for small 
mercies. I compared notes with one of my 
friends who expects everything of the uni- 
verse, and is disappointed when anything is 
less than the best, and I found that I begin at 
the other extreme, expecting nothing, and 
am always full of thanks for moderate goods. 
I accept the clangor and jangle of contrary 
tendencies. I find my account in sots and 
bores also. They give a reality to the circum- 
jacent picture, which such a vanishing meteor- 
ous appearance can ill spare. In the morning 
I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes, 
and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old 
spiritual world, and even the dear old devil 
not very far off. If we will take the good we- 
find, asking no questions, we shall have heap- 
ing measures. The great gifts are not got by 
analysis. Everything good is on the highway.^ 
The middle region of our being is the temper'^ 
ate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold 
realmof pure geometry and lifeless science, or 
sink into that of sensation. Between these 
extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of 
spirit, of poetry, — a narrow belt. Moreover, 



106 ESSAY IV. 

in popular experience, everything is on the 
highway. A collector peeps into all the 
picture-shops of Europe for a landscape of 
Poussin, a crayon sketch of Salvator ; but the 
Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Com- 
munion of St. Jerome, and what are as tran- 
scendent as these, are on the walls of the 
Vatican, the Uffizi, or the Louvre, where every 
footman may see them; to say nothing of 
nature's pictures in every street, or sunsets 
and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of 
the human body never absent. A collector 
recently bought at public auction, in London, 
for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an 
autograph of Shakespeare : but for nothing a 
school-boy can read Hamlet, and can detect 
secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished 
therein. I think I will never read any but the 
commonest books — the Bible, Homer, Dante, 
Shakespeare, and Milton. Then we are im- 
patient of so public a life and planet, and run 
hither and thither for nooks and secrets. The 
imagination delights in the woodcraft of In- 
dians, trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy 
that we are strangers, and not so intimately 
domesticated in the planet as the wild man, 
and the wild beast and bird. But the exclu- 
sion reaches them also ; reaches the climbing, 



EXPERIENCE. 107 

flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. 
Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe, and bit- 
tern, when nearly seen, have no more root in 
the deep world than man, and are just such 
superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new 
molecular philosophy shows astronomical inter- 
spaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the 
world is all outside: it has no inside. 

The mid- world is best. Nature, as we know 
her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the 
ascetics, Gentbos and Grahamites, she does 
not distinguish by any favor. She comes 
eating and drinking and sinning. Her dar- 
lings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are 
not children of our law, do not come out of the 
Sunday-school, nor weigh their food, nor 
punctually keep the commandments. If we 
will be strong with her strength, we must not 
harbor such disconsolate consciences, bor- 
rowed too from the consciences of other 
nations. We must set up the strong present 
tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or 
to come. So many things are unsettled which 
it is the first importance to settle, — and, pend- 
ing their settlement, we will do as we do. 
Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity 
of commerce, and will not be closed for a cen^ 
tury or two, New and Old England may keep 



108 ESSAY IV. 

shop. Law of copyright and international 
copyright is to be discussed, and, in the inte- 
rim, we will sell our books for the most we 
can. Expediency of literature, reason of 
literature, lawfulness of writing down a 
thought, is questioned, much is to say on both 
sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, 
dear scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a 
line every hour, and between whiles add a line. 
Right to hold land, right of property, is dis- 
puted, and the conventions convene, and before 
the vote is taken, dig away in your garden, 
and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend 
to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life 
itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep 
within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more 
as they will, — but thou, God's darling! heed 
thy private dream : thou wilt not be missed in 
the scorning and skepticism : there are enough 
of them : stay there in thy closet, and toil, until 
the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy 
sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require 
that thou do this or avoid that, but know that 
thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, 
and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. 
Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the 
universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the 
better. 



EXPERIENCE. 109 

Human life is made up of two elements, 
power and form, and the proportion must be 
invariably kept, if we would have it sweet and 
sound. Each of these elements in excess 
makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect. 
Everything rubs to excess : every good quality 
is noxious, if unmixed, and, to carry the dan- 
ger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each 
man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, 
among the farms, we adduce the scholars as 
examples of this treachery. They are nature's 
victims of expression. You who see the artist, 
the orator, the poet, too near, and find their 
life no more excellent than that of mechanics 
or farmers, and themselves victims of parti- 
ality, very hollow and haggard, and pronounce 
them failures, — not heroes, but quacks, — con- 
clude very reasonably that these arts are not 
for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not 
bear you out. Irresistible nature made men 
such, and makes legions more of such every 
day. You love the boy reading in a book, 
gazing at a drawing, or a cast : yet what are 
these millions who read and behold, but incip- 
ient writers and sculptors? Add a little more 
of that quality which now reads and sees, and 
they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one 
remembers how innocently he began to be an 



no ESSAY IV. 

artist, he perceives that natnre joined with 
his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. 
The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. 
The wise through excess of wisdom is made a 
fool. 

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might 
keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust 
ourselves, once for all, to the perfect calcula- 
tion of the kingdom of known cause and effect. 
In the street and in the newspapers, life ap- 
pears so plain a business, that manly resolution 
and adherence to the multiplication table 
through all weathers will insure success. But 
ah ! presently comes a day, or is it only a half- 
hour, with its angel-whispering, — which dis- 
comfits the conclusions of nations and of years! 
To-morrow again everything looks real and 
angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, 
common sense is as rare as genius, — is the 
basis of genius, and experience is hands and 
feet to every enterprise;— and yet, he who 
should do his business on this understanding 
would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps 
quite another road than the turnpikes of choice 
and will, namely, the subterranean and invis- 
ible tunnels and channels of life. It is ridicu- 
lous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, and 
considerate people: there are no dupes like 



EXPERIENCE. Ill 

these. Life is a series of surprises, and 
would not be worth taking or keeping, if it 
were not. God delights to isolate us every- 
day, and hide from us the past and the 
future. We would look about us, but with 
grand politeness he draws down before us 
an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and 
another behind us of purest sky. *'You will 
not remember, *' he seems to say, '*and you 
will not expect.'' All good conversation, 
manners, and action, come from a spontaneity 
which forgets usage, and makes the moment 
great. Nature hates calculators; her methods 
are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by 
pulses ; our organic movements are such ; and 
the chemical and ethereal agents are undula- 
tory and alternate ; and the mind goes antag- 
onizing on, and never prospers but by fits. 
We thrive by casualties. Our chief experi- 
ences have been casual. The most attractive 
class of people are those who are powerful 
obliquely, and not by the direct stroke : men 
of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets 
the cheer of their light, without paying too 
great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird, 
or the morning light, and not of art. In the 
thought of genius there is always a surprise ; 
and the moral sentiment is well called **the 



112 ESSAY IV. 

newness," for it is never other; as new to the 
oldest intelligence as to the young child, — 
"the kingdom that cometh without observa- 
tion. ' ' In like manner, for practical success, 
there must not be too much design. A man 
will not be observed in doing that which he 
can do best. There is a certain magic about 
his properest action, which stupefies your 
powers of observation, so that though it is done 
before you, you wist not of it. The art of life 
has a pudency and will not to be exposed. 
Every man is an impossibility, until he is born ; 
everything impossible, until we see a success. 
The ardors of piety agree at last with the 
coldest skepticism, — that nothing is of us or 
our works, — that all is of God. Nature will not 
spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writ- 
ing comes by the grace of God, and all doing 
and having. I would gladly be moral, and 
keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly 
love, and allow the most to the will of man, 
but I have set my heart on honesty in this 
chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in suc- 
cess or failure, than more or less of vital force 
supplied from the Eternal. The results of life 
are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years 
teach much which the days never know. The 
persons who compose our company, converse,. 



EXPERIENCE. 113 

and come and go, and design and execute 
many things, and somewhat comes of it all, 
but an unlooked-for result. The individual is 
always mistaken. He designed many things, 
and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quar- 
reled with some or all, blundered much, and 
something is done ; all are a little advanced, 
but the individual is always mistaken. It turns 
out somewhat new, and very unlike what he 
promised himself. 

The ancients, struck with the irreducibleness 
of the elements of human life to calculation, 
exalted Chance into a divinity, but that is to 
stay too long at the spark,— which glitters truly 
at one point, — but the universe is warm with 
the latency of the same fire. The miracle of 
life which will not be expounded, but will 
remain a miracle, introduces a new element. 
In the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard 
Home, I think, noticed that the evolution was 
not from one central point, but co-active from 
three or more points. Life has no memory. 
That which proceeds in succession might be 
remembered, but that which is co-existent, or 
ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from 
being conscious, knows not its own tendency. 
So it is with us, now skeptical, or without unity, 
because immersed in forms and effects al] 

8 



114 ESSAY IV. 

seeming to be of equal yet hostile value, and 
now religious, whilst in the reception of spir- 
itual law. Bear with these distractions, with 
this coetaneous growth of the parts : they will 
one day be members, and obey one will. On 
that one will, on that secret cause, they nail 
our attention and hope. Life is hereby melted 
into an expectation or a religion. Under- 
neath the inharmonious and trivial particulars 
is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying 
always with us, the heaven without rent or 
seam. Do but observe the mode of our illu- 
mination. When I converse with a profound 
mind, or at any time being alone I have good 
thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfac- 
tions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, 
or go to the fire, being cold : no ! but I am at 
first appraised of my vicinity to a new and 
excellent region of life. By persisting to read 
or to think, this region gives further sign of 
itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden 
discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, 
as if the clouds that covered it parted at inter- 
vals, and showed the approaching traveler the 
inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal 
meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks 
graze, and shepherds pipe and dance. But 
every insight from this realm of thought is felt 



EXPERIENCE. 115 

as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not 
make it; I arrive there, and behold what was 
there already. I make ! O no ! I clap my 
hands in infantine joy and amazement, before 
the first opening to me of this august magnifi- 
cence, old with the love and homage of innu- 
merable ages, young with the life of life, the 
sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a 
future it opens! I feel a new heart beating 
with the love of the new beauty. I am ready 
to die out of nature, and be born again into 
this new yet unapproachable America I have 
found in the West. 

"Since neither now nor yesterday began 
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can 
A man be found who their first entrance knew.'* 

If I have described life as a flux of moods, 
I must now add, that there is that in us which 
changes not, and which ranks all sensations 
and states of mind. The consciousness in each 
man is a sliding scale, which identifies him 
now with the First Cause, and now with the 
flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite 
degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung 
determines the dignity of any deed and the 
question ever is, not what you have done or 
forborne, but, at whose command you have 
done or forborne it. 



116 ESSAY IV. 

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — 
these are quaint names, too narrow to cover 
this unbounded substance. The baffled intellect 
must still kneel before this cause, which re- 
fuses to be named, — ineffable cause, which 
every fine genius has essayed to represent by 
some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, 
Anaximenes by Air, Anaxagoras by {Novs) 
thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the mod- 
erns by love : and the metaphor of each has 
become a national religion. The Chinese 
Mencius has not been the least successful in 
his generalization. ''I fully understand lan- 
guage,*' he said, **and nourish well my vast- 
flowing vigor. — *'I beg to ask what you call 
*vast flowing vigor?* '* — said his companion. 
"The explanation," replied Mencius, 'Ms diffi- 
cult. This vigor is supremely great, and in 
the highest degree unbending. Nourish it 
correctly, and do it no injury, and it will fill 
up the vacancy between heaven and earth. 
This vigor accords with and assists justice and 
reason, and leaves no hunger.'* — In our more 
correct writing we give to this generalization 
the name of Being and thereby confess that 
we have arrived as far as we can go. Suffice 
it for the joy of the universe, tliat we have not 
arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. 



EXPERIENCE. 117 

Our life seems not present, so much as pros- 
pective; not for the affairs on which it is 
wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing 
vigor. Most of life seems to be mere adver- 
tisement of faculty: information is given us 
not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very- 
great. So, in particulars, our greatness is 
always in a tendency or direction, not in an 
action. It is for us to believe in the rule, 
not in the exception. The noble are thus known 
from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading 
of the sentiments, it is not what we believe 
concerning the immortality of the soul, or the 
like, but the universal impulse to believe, that 
is the material circumstance, and is the prin- 
cipal fact in the history of the globe. Shall 
we describe this cause as that which works 
directly? The spirit is not hopeless or needful 
of mediate organs. It was plentiful powers 
and direct effects. I am explained without 
explaining, I am felt without acting, and 
where am I not. Therefore all just persons 
are satisfied with their own praise. They 
refuse to explain themselves, and are content 
that new actions should do them that office. 
They believe that we communicate without 
speech, and above speech, and that no right 
action of ours is quite unaffecting to our 



118 ESSAY IV. 

friends, at whatever distance ; for the influence 
of action is not to be measured by miles. Why 
should I fret myself, because a circumstance 
has occurred which hinders my presence 
where I was expected? If I am not at the 
meeting, my presence where I am should be 
as useful to the commonwealth of friendship 
and wisdom, as would be my presence in that 
place. I exert the same quality of power in 
that place. I exert the same quality of power 
in all places. Thus journeys the mighty Ideal 
before us; it never was known to fall into the 
rear. No man ever came to an experience 
which was satiating, but his good is tidings 
of a better. Onward and onward! In liber- 
ated moments, we know that a new picture of 
life and duty is already possible; the elements 
already exist in many minds around you, of a 
doctrine of life which shall transcend any 
written record we have. The new statement 
will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the 
faiths of a society, and out of unbeliefs a 
creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are 
not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations 
of the affirmative statement, and the new phi- 
losophy must take thme in, and make affirma- 
tions outside of them, just as much as it must 
include the oldest beliefs. 



EXPERIENCE. 119 

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped,^^ 
the discovery we have made, that we exist. 
That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever 
afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We 
have learned that we do not see directly, but 
meditately, and that we have no means of cor- 
recting these colored and distorted lenses which 
we are, or of computing the amount of their 
errors. Perhaps these subject-lepses have a 
creative power; perhaps there are no objects. 
Once we lived in what we saw ; now, the rapa- 
ciousness of this new power, which threatens 
to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, 
persons, letters, religions, — objects, successive- 
ly tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. 
Nature and literature are subjective phenom- 
ena; every evil and every good thing is a 
shadow which we cast. The street is full of 
humiliations to the proud. As the fop con- 
trived to dress his bailiffs in his livery, and 
make them wait on his guests at table, so the 
chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bub- 
bles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen 
in the street, shopmen or barkeepers in hotels, 
and threaten or insult whatever is threatenable 
and insultable in us. *Tis the same with our 
idolatries. People forget that it is the eye 
which makes the horizon, and the rounding 



120 ESSAY IV. 

mind's eye which makes this or that man a 
type or represntative of humanity with the 
name of hero or saint. Jesus the '^providen- 
tial man,'* is a good man on whom many peo- 
ple are agreed that these optical laws shall take 
effect. By love on one part, and by forbear- 
ance to press objection on the other p rt, it is 
for a time settled, that we will look at him in 
the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him 
the properties that will attach to any man so 
seen. But the longest love or aversion has a 
speedy term. The great and crescive self, 
rooted in absolute nature, supplants all rela- 
tive existences, and ruins the kingdom of mor- 
tal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is 
called the spiritual world), is impossible, be- 
cause of the inequality between every subject 
and every object. The subject is the receiver 
of Godhead, and at every comparison must feel 
his being enhanced by that cryptic might. 
Though not in energy, yet by presence, this 
magazine of substance cannot be otherwise 
than felt ; nor can any force of intellect attri- 
bute to the object the proper deity which sleeps 
or wakes forever in every subject. Never can 
love make consciousness and ascription equal 
in force. There will be the same gulf between 
every me and thee, as between the original and 



EXPERIENCE. 121 

the picture. The universe is the bride of the 
soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two 
human beings are like globes, which can touch 
only in a point, and, whilst they remain in con- 
tact, all other points of each of the spheres 
are inert; their turn must also come, and the 
longer a particular union lasts, the more en- > 
ergy of appetency the parts not in union ac-y 
quire. '-''■^' 

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided 
nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would 
be chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the 
only begotten, and though revealing itself as 
child in time, child in appearance, is of a fatal 
and universal power, admittig no co-life. 
Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed 
deity. We believe in ourselves, as we do not 
believe in others. We permit all things to our- 
selves, and that which we call sin in others, is 
experiment for us. It is an instance of our 
faith in ourselves, that men never speak of 
crime as lightly as they think ; or, every man 
thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is no- 
wise to be indulged to another. The act looks 
very differently on the inside, and on the out- 
side; in its quality, and in its consequences. 
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous 
thought as poets and romancers will have it; 



122 ESSAY IV. 

it does not unsettle him, or fright him from 
his ordinary notice of trifles ; it is an act quite 
easy to be contemplated, but in its sequel, it 
turns out to be a horrible jangle and confound- 
ing of all relations. Especially the crimes that 
spring from love, seem right and fair from the 
actor's point of view, but, when acted, are 
found destructive of society. No man at least 
believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime 
in him is as black as in the felon, because the 
intellect qualifies in our own case the moral 
judgments. For there is no crime to the intel- 
lect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and 
judges law as well as fact. '*It is worse than 
a crime, it is a blunder, *' said Napoleon, speak- 
ing the language of the intellect. To it, the 
world is a problem in mathematics or the sci- 
ence of quantity, and it leaves out praise and 
blame, and all weak emotions. All stealing is 
comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray 
who does not steal? Saints are sad, because 
they behold sin (even when they speculate) 
from the point of view of the conscience, and 
not of the intellect ; a confusion of thought. 
Sin seen from the thought, is a diminution or 
less; seen from the conscience or will, it is 
pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, 
absence of light, and no essence. The con- 



EXPERIENCE. 123 

science must feel it as essence, essential evil. 
This it is not; it has an objective existence, 
but no subjective. 

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our 
color, and every object fall successively into 
the subject itself. The subject exists, the sub- 
ject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall 
into place. As I am, so I see ; use what lan- 
guage we will, we can never say anything but 
what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, 
Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers. 
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encoun- 
ter a great man, let us treat the new comer 
like a traveling geologist, who passes through 
our estate, and shows us good slate, or lime- 
stone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The 
partial action of each strong mind in one direc- 
tion, is a telescope for the objects on which it 
is pointed. But every other part of knowledge 
is to be pushed to the same extravagance, ere 
the soul attains her due sphericity. Do you 
see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? 
If you could look with her eyes, you might see 
her surrounded with hundreds of figures per- 
forming complex dramas, with tragic issues, 
long conversations, many characters, many 
ups and downs of fate, — and meantime it is 
only puss and her tail. How long before our 



124 ESSAY IV. 

masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, 
laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it 
was a solitary performance? — A subject and an 
object, — it takes so much to make the galvanic 
circuit complete, but magnitude adds nothing. 
What imports it whether it is Kepler and the 
sphere, Columbus and America; a reader and 
his book; or puss with her tail? 

It is true that all the muses and love and re- 
ligion hate these developments, and will find a 
way to punish the chemist, who publishes in 
the parlor the secrets of the laboratory. And 
we cannot say too little of our constitutional 
necessity of seeing things under private as- 
pects, or saturated with our humors. And yet 
is the God the native of these bleak rocks. 
That need makes in mortals the capital virtue 
of self-trust. We must hold hard to this pov- 
erty, however scandalous, and by more vigor- 
ous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action, 
possess our axis more firmly. The life of truth 
is cold, and so far mournful; but it is not the 
slave of tears, contritions, and perturbations. 
It does not attempt another's work, nor adopt 
another's facts. It is a main lesson of wisdom 
to know your own from another's. I have 
learned that I cannot dispose of other people's 
facts; but I possess such a key to my own, as 



EXPERIENCE. 125 

persuades me against all their denials, that 
they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic 
person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer 
among drowning men, who all catch at him, 
and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, 
they will drown him. They wish to be saved 
from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from 
their vices. Charity would be wasted on this 
poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and 
hardy physician will say, Come out of that, as 
the first condition of advice. 

In this our talking America, we are ruined 
by our good nature and listening on all sides. 
This compliance takes away the power of be- 
ing greatly useful. A man should not be able 
to look other than directly and forthright. A 
preoccupied attention is the only answer to the 
importunate frivolity of other people ; an at- 
tention, and to an aim which makes their 
wants frivolous. This is a divine answer, and 
leaves no appeal, and no hard thoughts. In 
Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of 
-^schylusi, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst 
the Furies sleep on the threshold. The face 
of the god expresses a shade of regret and 
compassion, but calm with the conviction of 
the irreconcilableness of the two spheres. He 
is born into other politics, into the eternal 



126 ESSAY IV, 

and beautiful. The man at his feet asks for 
his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which 
his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides 
there lying express pictorially this disparity. 
The god is surcharged with his divine destiny. 
Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, 
Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are 
threads on the loom of time, these are the 
lords of life. I dare not assume to give their 
order, but I name them as I find them in my 
way. I know better than to claim any com- 
pleteness for my picture. I am a fragment^ 
and this is a fragment of me. I can very con-- 
fidently announce one of another law, which 
throws itself into relief and form, but I am too 
young yet by some ages to compile a code. I 
gossip for my hour concerning the eternal pol- 
itics. I have seen many fair pictures not in 
vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I 
am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet sev- 
en years ago. Let who will ask, where is the 
fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This 
is a fruit, — that I should not ask for a rash 
effect from meditations, counsels, and the hiv- 
ing of truths. I should feel it pitiful to de- 
mand a result of this town and county, an 
over effect on the instant month and year. 
The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It 



EXPERIENCE. 127 

works on periods in which mortal lifetime is 
lost. All I know is reception ; I am and I have ; 
but I do not get, and when I have fancied I 
had gotten anything, I found I did not. I wor- 
ship with wonder the great Fortune. My re- 
ception has been so large, that lam not annoyed 
by receiving this or that superabundantly. I 
say to the Genius, if he will pardon the prov- 
erb, In for a mill, in for a million. When I 
receive a new gift, I do not maserate my body 
to make the account square, for, if I should 
die, I could not make the account square. 
The benefit overran the merit the first day, 
and has overran the merit ever since. The 
merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the re- 
ceiving. 

Also, that hankering after an overt or prac- 
tical effect seems to me an apostacy. In good 
earnest, I am willing to spare this most unnec- 
essary deal of doing. Life wears to me a vis- 
ionary face. Hardest, roughest action is vis- 
ionary also. It is but a choice between soft 
and turbulent dreams. People disparage know- 
ing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. 
I am very content with knowing, if only I 
could know. That is an august entertainment, 
and would suffice me a great while. To know 
a little, would be worth the expense of this 



j 



128 ESSAY IV. 

world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, 
"that every soul which had acquired any truth, 
should be safe from harm until another period. " 
/^l know that the world I converse with in the 
. city and in the farms, is not the world I think. 
I observe that difference, and shall observe it. 
One day, I shall know the value and law of 
this discrepance. But I have not found that 
much was gained by manipular attempts to 
realize the world of thought. Many eager per- 
sons successively make an experiment in this 
way, and make themselves ridiculous. They 
acquire democratic manners, they foam at the 
mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, 1 observe, 
that, in the history of mankind, there is never 
a solitary example of success, — taking their 
own tests of success. I say this polemically, 
or in reply to the inquiry, why not realize your 
world? But far be from me the despair which 
prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism, — 
since there never was a right endeavor, but it 
succeeded. Patience and patience, we shall 
win at the last. We must be very suspicious 
of the deceptions of the element of time. It 
takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or 
to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little 
time to entertain a hope and an insight which 
becomes the light of our life. We dress our gar- 



EXPEkffiNCE. 129 

den, eat our dinners, discuss the household 
with our wives, and these things make no im- 
pression, are forgotten next week ; but in the 
solitude to which every man is always return- 
ing, he has a sanity and revelations, which in 
his passage into new worlds he will carry with 
him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind 
the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to 
say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and 
the true romance which the world exists to 
realize, will be the transformation of genius 
into practical power. 



ESSAY V. 



CHARACTER. 

I have read that those who listened to Lord 
Chatham felt that there was something finer in 
the man, than anything which he said. It 
has been complained of our brilliant English 
historian of the French Revolution, that when 
he has told all his facts about Mirabeau, they 
do not justify his estimate of his genius. The 
Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of Plu- 
tarch's heroes, do not in the records of facts 
equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, 
the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, are men 
of great figure, and of few deeds. He cannot 
find the smallest part of the personal weight of 
Washington in the narrative of his exploits. 
The authority of the name of Schiller is too 
great for his books. This inequality of the 
reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not 
accounted for by saying that the reverberation 
is longer than the thunder-clap; but some- 
what resided in these men which begot an 
expectation that outran all their performance. 

130 



CHARACTER. 131 

The largest part of their power was latent. 
This is that which we call Character, — a re- 
served force which acts directly by presence, 
and without means. It is conceived of as a 
certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or 
Genius by whose impulses the man is guided, 
but whose counsels he cannot impart ; which 
is company for him, so that such men are 
often solitary, or if they chance to be social, 
do not need society, but can entertain them- 
selves very well alone. The purest literary 
talent appears at one time great, at another 
time small, but character is of a stellar and 
undiminishable greatness. What others effect 
by talent or by eloquence, this man accom- 
plishes by some magnetism. **Half his 
strength he puts not forth.** His victories 
are by demonstration of superiority, and not 
by crossing of bayonets. He conquers, because 
his arrival alters the face of affairs. **0 
lole ! how did you know that Hercules was a 
god?** '* Because,** answered lole, **I was 
content the moment my eyes fell on him. 
When I beheld Theseus, I desired that I 
might see him offer battle-, or at least guide 
his horses in the chariot-race; but Hercules 
did not wait for a contest; he conquered 
whether he stood, or walked or sat, or what- 



132 ESSAY V. 

ever thing he did.*' Man, ordinarily a pen- 
dant to events, only half attached, and that 
awkwardly, to the world he lives in, in these 
examples appears to share the life of things, 
and to be an expression of the same laws 
which control the tides and the sun, numbers 
and quantities. 

But to use a more modest illustration, and 
nearer home, I observe, that in our political 
elections, where this element, if it appear at 
all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we 
suflSciently understand its incomparable rate. 
The people know that they need in their rep- 
resentative much more than talent, namely, the 
power to make his talent trusted. They 
cannot come at their ends by sending to Con- 
gress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, if 
he be not one who, before he was appointed 
by the people to represent them, was ap- 
pointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, — 
invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself, — 
so that the most confident and the most violent 
persons learn that here is resistance on which 
both impudence and terror are wasted, namely, 
faith in an act. The men who carry their 
points do not need to inquire of their consti- 
tuents what they should say, but are them- 
selves the country which they represent; 



I 



CHARACTER. 133 

nowhere are its emotions or opinions so 
instant and true as in them ; nowhere so pure 
from a selfish infusion. The constituency at 
home hearkens to their words, watches the 
color of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, 
dresses its own. Our public assemblies are 
pretty good tests of manly force. Our frank 
countrymen of the west and south have a test 
for character, and like to know whether the 
New Englander is a substantial man, or 
whether the hand can pass through him. 

The same motive force appears in trade. 
There are geniuses in trade as well as in war, 
or the state, or letters; and the reason why 
this or that man is fortunate, is not to be told. 
It lies in the man ; that is all anybody can tell 
you about it. See him, and you will know as 
easily why he succeeds, as, if you see Napo- 
leon, you would comprehend his fortune. In 
the new object we recognize the old game, 
the habit of fronting the fact, and not dealing 
with it at second hand, through the percep- 
tions of somebody else. Nature seems to 
authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural 
merchant, who appears not so much a private 
agent, as her factor and Minister of Commerce. 
His natural probity combines with his insight 
into the fabric of society, to put him above 



134 ESSAY V. 

tricks, and he communicates to all his own 
faith, that contracts are of no private inter- 
pretation. The habit of his mind is a refer- 
ence to standards of natural equity and 
public advantage, and he inspires respect, and 
the wish to deal with him, both for the quiet- 
spirit of honor which attends him, and for the 
intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so 
much ability affords. This immensely stretched 
trade, which makes the capes of the Southern 
Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his 
familiar port, centers in his brain only ; and 
nobody in the universe can make his place 
good. In his parlor, I see very well that he 
has been at hard work this morning, with 
that knitted brow, and that settled humor, 
which all his desire to be courteous cannot 
shake off. I see plainly how many firm acts 
have been done ; how many valiant noes have 
this day been spoken, when others would have 
uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride 
of art, and skill of masterly arithmetic and 
power of remote combination, the conscious- 
ness of being an agent and playfellow of the 
original laws of the world. He too believes 
that none can supply him, and that a man 
must be born to trade, or he cannot learn it. 
This virtue draws the mind more, when it 



CHARACTER. 135 

appears in action to ends not so mixed. It 
works with most energy in the smallest com- 
panies and in private relations. In all cases, 
it is an extraordinary and incomputable agent. 
The excess of physical strength is paralyzed 
by it. Higher natures overpower lower ones 
by affecting them with a certain sleep. The 
faculties are locked up, and offers no resist- 
ance. Perhaps that is the universal law. 
When the high cannot bring up the low to 
itself, it benumbs it, as man charms down 
the resistance of the lower animals. Men 
exert on each other a similar occult power. 
How often has the influences of a true master 
realized all the tales of magic! A river of 
command seemed to run down from his eyes 
into all those who beheld him, a torrent of 
strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, 
which pervaded them with his thoughts, and 
colored all events with the hue of his mind. 
**What means did you employ?" was the ques- 
tion asked of the wife of Concini, in regard to 
the treatment of Mary of Medici; and the 
answer was, *'Only that influence which every 
strong mind has over a weak one.'* Cannot 
Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons, and trans- 
fer them to the person of Hippo or Thraso the 
turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable a 



136 ESSAY V. 

bond? Suppose a slaver on the coast of 
Guinea should take on board a gang of 
negroes, which should contain persons of the 
stamp of Toussaint L*Ouverture; or, let us 
fancy, under these swarthy masks he has a 
gang of Washingtons in chains. When they 
arrive at Cuba, will the relative order of the 
ship's company be the same? Is there noth- 
ing but rope and iron? Is there no love, no 
reverence? Is there never a glimpse of right 
in a poor slave-captain's mind; and cannot 
these be supposed available to break, or elude, 
or in any manner overmatch the tension of an 
inch or two of iron ring? 

This is a natural power, like light and heat 
and all nature co-operates with it. The 
reason why we feel one man*s presence, and 
do not feel another's, is as simple as gravity. 
Truth is the summit of being; justice is the 
application of it to affairs. All individual 
natures should stand in a scale, according to 
the purity of this element in them. The will 
of the pure runs down from them into other 
natures, as water runs down from a higher into 
a lower vessel. This natural force is no more 
to be withstood, than any other natural force. 
We can drive a stone upward for a moment 
into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will 



CHARACTER. 137 

forever fall; and whatever instances can be 
quoted of unpunished theft, or of a lie which 
somebody credited, justice must prevail, audit 
is the privilege of truth to make itself believed. 
Character is this moral order seen through 
the medium of an individual nature. An indi- 
vidual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty 
and necessity, truth and thought, are left at 
large no longer. Now, the universe is a close 
or pound. All things exist in the man tinged 
with the manners of his soul. With what 
quality is in him, he infuses all nature that he 
can reach; nor does he tend to lose himself in 
vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, all 
his regards return into his own good at last. 
He animates all he can, and he sees only what 
he animates. He encloses the world, as the 
patriot does his country, as a material basis for 
his character, and a theatre for action. A 
healthy soul stands united with the Just and 
the True, as the magnet arranges itself with 
the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like 
a transparent object betwixt them and the 
sun, and whose journeys toward the sun, 
journeys toward that person. He is thus the 
medium of the highest influence to all who are 
not on the same level. Thus, men of character 



188 ESSAY V. 

are the conscience of the society to which they 
belong. 

The natural measure of this power is the 
resistance of circumstances. Impure men con- 
sider life as it is reflected in opinions, events, 
and persons. They cannot see the action, 
until it is done. Yet its moral element pre- 
existed in the actor, and its quality as right 
and wrong, it was easy to predict. Every- 
thing in nature is bipolar, or has a positive 
and negative pole. There is a male and a 
female, a spirit and a fact, a north and a 
south. Spirit is the positive, the event is 
the negative. Will is the north, action the 
south pole. Character may be ranked as hav- 
ing its natural place in the north. It shares 
the magnetic currents of the system. The 
feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative 
pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the 
action. They never behold a principle until it 
is lodged in a person. They do not wish to be 
lovely, but to be loved. This class of character 
like to hear of their faults; the other class do 
not like to hear of faults; they worship events; 
secure to them a fact, a connection, a certain 
chain of circumstances, and they will ask no 
more. The hero sees that the event is ancil- 
lary; it mast follow him. A given order of 



CHARACTER. IM 

events has no power to secure to him the sat- 
isfaction which the imagination attaches to it ; 
the soul of goodness escapes from any set of 
circumstances, Vvrhilst prosperity belongs to a 
certain mind, and will introduce that power 
and victory which is its natural fruit, into any 
order of events. No change of circumstances 
can repair a defect of character. We boast our 
emancipation from many superstitions; but if 
we have broken any idols, it is through a 
transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained 
that I, no longer immolate a bull to Jove, or 
to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do 
not tremble before the Eumenides, or the 
Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judg- 
ment-day, — if I quake at opinion, the public 
opinion, as we call it ; or at the threat of assault, 
or contumely, or bad neighbors, or poverty, or 
mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of 
murder? If I quake, what matters it what I 
quake at? Our proper vice takes form in one 
or another shape, according to the sex, age, or 
temperament of the person, and, if we are 
capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The 
covetousness or the malignity which saddens 
me, when I ascribe it to society, is my own. 
I am always environed by myself. On the 
other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory. 



140 ESSAY V. 

celebrated not by cries of joy, but by serenity, 
which is joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful 
to fly to events for confirmation of our truth 
and worth. The capitalist does not run every 
hour to the broker, to coin his advantages into 
current money of the realm ; he is satisfied to 
read in the quotations of the market, that his 
stocks have risen. The same transport which 
the occurrence of the best events in the best 
order would occasion me, I must learn to taste 
purer in the perception that my position is 
every hour meliorated, and does already com- 
mand those events I desire. That exultation 
is only to be checked by the foresight of an 
order of things so excellent as to throw all our 
prosperities into the deepest shade. 

The face which character wears to me is self 
sufficingness. I revere the person who is 
riches; so that I cannot think of him as alone, 
or poor, or exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but 
as perpetual patron, benefactor, and beautified 
man. Character is centrality, the impossi- 
bility of being displaced or overset. A man 
should give us a sense of mass. Society is 
frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its 
conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But 
if I go to see an ingenious man, I shall think 
myself poorly entertained if he give me nimble 



CHARACTER. 141 

pieces of benevolence and etiquette ; rather he 
shall stand stoutly in his place, and let me 
apprehend, if it were only his resistance ; know 
that I have encountered a new and positive 
quality; — great refreshment for both of us» 
It is much, that he does not accept the con- 
ventional opinions and practices. That non- 
conformity will remain a goad and remem- 
brancer, and every inquirer will have to 
dispose of him, in the first place. There is 
nothing real or useful that is not a seat of war. 
Our houses ring with laughter and personal 
and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the 
uncivil, unavailable man, who is a problem 
and a threat to society, whom it cannot let 
pass in silence, but must either worship or 
hate, — and to whom all parties feel related, 
both the leaders of opinion and the obscure 
and eccentric, — he helps; he puts America 
and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the 
skepticism which says, **man is a doll, let us 
eat and drink, 'tis the best we can do," by 
illuminating the untried and unknown. Ac- 
quiescence in the establishment, and appeal 
to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads 
whio-h are not clear and which must see a 
house built, before they can comprehend the 
plan of it. The wise man not only leaves out 



142 ESSAY V. 

of his thought the many, but leaves out the 
few. Mountains, fountains, the self-moved, 
the absorbed, the commander because he is 
commanded, the assured, the primary, — they 
are good ; for these announce the instant pres- 
ence of supreme power. 

Our action should rest mathematically on 
our substance. In nature, there are no false 
valuations. A pound of water in the ocean- 
tempest has no more gravity than in a mid- 
summer pond. All things work exactly accord- 
ing to their quality, and according to their 
quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do> 
except man only. He has pretension; he 
wishes and attempts things beyond his force/. 
I read in a book of English memoirs, "Mr. Fox 
(afterward Lord Holland) said, he must have 
the Treasury; he had served up to it, and 
would have if — Xenophon and his Ten 
Thousand were quite equal to what they 
attempted, and did it; so equal, that it was 
not suspected to be a grand and inimitable 
exploit. Yet there stands that fact unre- 
peated, a high-water-mark in military history. 
Many have attempted it since, and not been 
equal to it. It is only on reality, that any 
power of action can be based. No institution 
will be better than the institutor. I know an 



CHARACTER. 143 

amiable and accomplished person who under- 
took a practical reform, yet I was never able 
to find in him the enterprise of love he took in 
hand. He adopted it by ear and by the under- 
standing from the books he had been reading. 
All his action was tentative, a piece of the 
city carried out into the fields, and was the city 
still, and no new fact, and could not inspire 
enthusiasm. Had there been something latent 
in the man, a terrible undemonstrated genius 
agitating and embarrassing his demeanor, we 
had watched for its advent. It is not enough 
that the intellect should see the evils and their 
remedy. We shall still postpone our exist- 
ence, nor take the ground to which we are 
entitled, whilst it is only a thought, and not a 
spirit that incites us. We have not yet served 
up to it. 

These are the properties of life, and another 
trait is the notice of incessant growth. Men 
should be intelligent and earnest. They must 
also make us feel that they have a controlling 
happy future opening before them, which 
sheds a splendor on the passing hour. The 
hero is misconceived and misreported ; he can- 
not therefore wait to unravel any man's blun- 
ders: he is again on his road, adding new pow- 
ers and honors to his domain, and new claims 



144 ESSAY V. 

on yoilr heart, which will bankupt yon, if you 
have loitered about the old things, and have not 
kept your relation to him, by adding to your 
wealth. New actions are the only apologies 
and explanations of old ones, which the noble 
can bear to offer or to receive. If your friend 
has displeased you, you shall not sit down to 
consider it, for he has already lost all memory 
of the passage, and has doubled his power to 
serve you, and, ere you can rise up again, will 
burden you with blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a be- 
nevolence that it only measured by its works. 
Love is inexhaustible, and if its estate is 
wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and 
enriches, and the man, though he sleep, seems 
to purify the air, and his house to adorn the 
landscape and strengthen the laws. People 
always recognize this difference. We know 
who is benevolent, by quite other means than 
the amount of subscription to soup societies. 
It is only low merits that can be enumerated. 
Fear, when your friends say to you what you 
have done well, and say it through ; but when 
they vStand with uncertain timid looks of 
respect and half-dislike, and must suspend 
their judgment for years to come, you may 
begin to hope. Those who live to the fixture 



CHARACTER. 145 

must always appear selfish to those who live to 
the present. Therefore it was droll in the good 
Riemea, who has written memoirs of Goethe, 
to make out a list of his donations and good 
deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to 
Stilling, to Hegel, to Tischbein: a lucrative 
place found for Professor Voss, a post under 
the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for 
Meyer, two professors recommended to foreign 
universities, etc., etc. The longest list of 
specifications of benefit would look very short. 
A man is a poor creature, if he is to be meas- 
ured so. For, all these of course are excep- 
tions; and the rule and hodiernal life of a 
good man is benefaction. The true charity of 
Goethe is to be inferred from the account he 
gave Dr. Eckermann, of the way in which he 
had spent his fortune. **Each bonmot of mine 
has cost a purse of gold. Half a million of my 
own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary, 
and the large income derived from my writ- 
ings for fifty years back, have been expended 
to instruct me in what I now know. I have 
besides seen,** etc. 

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to 
enumerate traits of this simple and rapid 
power, and we are painting the lightning with 
charcoal; but in these long nights and vaca- 

10 



146 ESSAY V. 

tions, I like to console myself so. Nothing 
but itself can copy it. A word from the heart 
enriches me. I surrender at discretion. How 
death cold is literary genius before this fire of 
life! These are the touches that reanimate 
my heavy soul, and give it eyes to pierce the 
dark of nature. I find, where I thought my- 
self poor, there was I most rich. Thence 
comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be 
again rebuked by some new exhibition of 
character. Strange alternation of attraction 
and repulsion ! Character repudiates intellect, 
yet excites it; and character passes into 
thought, is published so, and then is ashamed 
before new flashes of moral worth. 

Character is nature in the highest form. It 
is of no use to ape it, or to contend with it. 
Somewhat is possible of resistance, and of per- 
sistence, and of creation, to this power, which 
will foil all emulation. 

This masterpiece is best where no hands but 
nature's have been laid on it. Care is taken 
that the greatly-destined shall slip up into life 
in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to 
watch and blazon every new thought, every 
blushing emotion of young genius. Two per- 
sons lately, — very young children of the most 
high God, — have given me occasion for 



CHARACTER. 147 

thought. When I explored the source of their 
sanctity, and charm for the imagination, it 
seemed as if each answered, ^*From my non- 
conformity: I never listened to your people's 
law, or to what they call their gospel, and 
wasted my time. I was content with the 
simple rural poverty of my own: hence this 
sweetness: my work never reminds you of 
that ; — is pure of that. ' * And nature advertises 
me in such persons, that, in democratic Amer- 
ica, she will not be democratized. How clois- 
tered and constitutionally sequestered from 
the market and from scandal! It was only 
this morning that I sent away some wild 
flowers of these wood-gods. They are a relief 
from literature, — these fresh draughts from 
the sources of thought and sentiment; as we 
read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first 
lines of written prose and verse of a nation. 
How captivating is their devotion to their fav- 
orite books, whether ^schylus, Dante, Shake- 
speare, or Scott, as feeling that they have a 
stake in that book : who touches that, touches 
them ; — and especially the total solitude of the 
critic, the Patmos of thought from which he 
writes, in unconsciousness of any eyes that 
shall every read this writing. Could they 
dream on still, as angels, and not wake to com- 



148 ESSAY V. 

parisons, and to be flattered! Yet some 
natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, 
and wherever the vein of thought reaches 
down into the profound, there is no danger 
from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them 
of the danger of the head's being turned by 
the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to 
smile. I remember the indignation of an elo- 
quent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a 
Doctor of Divinity, — *'My friend, a man can 
neither be praised nor insulted.'* But forgive 
the counsels ; they are very natural. I remem- 
ber the thought which occurred to me when 
some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came 
to America, was, *^Have you been victimized in 
being brought hither? — or, prior to that, answer 
me this, 'Are you victimizable!' " 

As I have said, nature keeps these sovereign 
ties in her own hands, and however pertly our 
sermons and disciplines would divide some 
share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion 
the citizens, she goes her own gait, and puts 
the wisest in the wrong. She makes very 
light of gospels and prophets, as one who has 
a great many more to produce, and no excess 
of time to spare on any one. There is a class 
of men, individuals of which appear at long 
intervals, so eminently endowed with insight 



CHARACTER. 149 

and virtue, that they have been unanimously 
saluted as divine, and who seem to be an 
accumulation of that power we consider. 
Divine persons are character born, or to bor- 
row a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory 
organized. They are usually received with ill 
will, because they are new, and because they 
set a bound to the exaggeration that has been 
made of the personality of the last divine per- 
son. Nature never rhymes her children, nor 
makes two men alike. When we see a great 
man, we fancy a resemblance to some histor- 
ical person, and predict the sequel of his char- 
acter and fortune, a result which he is sure to 
disappoint. None will ever solve the problem 
of his character according to our prejudice, 
but only in his own high, unprecedented way. 
Character wants room; must not be crowded 
on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses 
got in the press of affairs or on few occasions. 
It needs perspective, as a great building. It 
may not, probably does not, form relations 
rapidly ; and we should not require rash 
explanation, either on the popular ethics, or on 
our own, or its action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not 
think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in 
flesh and blood. Every trait which the artist 



150 ESSAY V. 

recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and bet- 
ter than his copy. We have seen many coun- 
terfeits, but we are born believers in great 
men. How easily we read in old books, when 
men were few, of the smallest action of the 
patriarchs. We require that a inan should be 
so large and columnar in the landscape, that it 
should deserve to be recorded, that he arose, 
and girded up his loins, and departed to such 
a place. The most credible pictures are those 
of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, 
and convinced the senses; as happened to the 
eastern magian who was sent to test the merits 
of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the Yunani 
sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, 
Gushtasp appointed a day on which the Mobeds 
of every country should assemble, and a golden 
chair was placed for the Yunani sage. Then 
the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, 
advanced into the midst of the assembly. The 
Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, **This 
form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but 
truth can proceed from them. ' * Plato said, it 
was impossible not to be believe in the children 
of the gods, ''though they should speak without 
probable or necessary arguments.'* I should 
think myself very unhappy in my associates, 
if I could not credit the best things in history. 



CHARACTER, 161 

'*John Bradshaw," says Milton, ** appears like 
a consul, from whom the fasces are not to 
depart with the year ; so that not on the tri- 
bunal only, but throughout his life, you would 
regard him as sitting in judgment upon 
kings.'* I find it more credible, since it is 
anterior information, that one man should 
know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so 
many men should know the world. **The 
virtuous prince confronts the gods, without 
any misgiving. He waits a hundred ages till 
a sage comes, and does not doubt. He who 
confronts the gods, without any misgiving, 
knows heaven ; he who waits a hundred ages 
until a sage comes, without doubting, knows 
men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, and 
forages shows empire the way." But there 
is no need to seek remote examples. He is a 
dull observer whose experience has not taught 
him the reality and force of magic, as well as 
of chemistry. The coldest precision cannot 
go abroad without encountering inexplicable 
influences. One man fastens an eye on him, 
and the graves of the memory render up their 
dead; the secrets that make him wretched 
either to keep or to betray, must be yielded; — 
another, and he cannot speak, and the bones 
of his body seem to lose their cartilages ; the 



152 ESSAY V. 

entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and 
eloquence to him ; and there are persons, he 
cannot choose but remember, who gave a 
transcendent expansion to his thought, and 
kindled another life in his bosom. 

What is so excellent as strict relations of 
amity, when they spring from this deep root? 
The sufficient reply to the skeptic, who doubts 
the power and the furniture of man, is in that 
possibility of joyful intercourse with persons, 
which makes the faith and practice of all rea- 
sonable men. I know nothing which life has 
to offer so satisfying as the profound good 
understanding, which can subsist, after much 
exchange of good offices, between two virtuous 
men, each of whom is sure of himself, and 
sure of his friend. It is a happiness which 
postpones all other gratifications, and makes 
politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. 
For, when men shall meet as they ought, each 
a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with 
thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, 
it should be the festival of nature which all 
things announce. Of such friendship, love in 
the sexes is the first symbol, as all other 
things are symbols of love. Those relations to 
the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned 



CHARACTER. 153 

the romances of youth, become, in the progress 
of the character, the most solid enjoyment. 

If it were possible to live in right relations 
with men! — if we could abstain from asking 
anything of them, from asking their praise, or 
help, or pity, and content us with compelling 
them through the virtue of the eldest laws! 
Could we not deal with a few persons, — with 
one person, — after the unwritten statutes, and 
make an experiment of their efficacy? Could 
we not pay our friend the compliment of truth, 
of silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager 
to seek him? If we are related, we shall 
meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world, 
that no metamorphosis could hide a god from 
a god ; and there is a Greek verse which runs, 

'*The gods are to each other not unknown.** 

Friends also follow the laws of divine neces- 
sity ; they gravitate to each other, and cannot 
otherwise : — 

**When each the other shall avoid 
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.** 

Their relation is not made, but allowed. The 
gods must seat themselves without seneschal 
in our Olympus, and as they can instal them- 
selves by seniority divine. Society is spoiled, 
if pains are taken, if the associates are brought 



154 ESSAY V. 

a mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is 
a mischievous, low, degrading jangle, though 
made up of the best. All the greatness of each 
is kept back, and every foible in painful activ- 
ity, as if Olympians should meet to exchange 
snuff-boxes. 

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying 
scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or com- 
mand behind us. But if suddenly we encoun- 
ter a friend, we pause ; or heat and hurry look 
foolish enough ; now pause, now possession, is 
required, and the power to swell the moment 
from the resources of the heart. The moment 
is all, in all noble relations. 

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ; 
a friend is the hope of the heart. Our beati- 
tude waits for the fulfillment of these two in 
one. The ages are opening this moral force. 
All force is the shadow or symbol of that* 
Poetry is joyful and strong, as it draws its 
inspiration thence. Men write their names on 
the world, as they are filled with this. His- 
tory has been mean; our nations have been 
mobs ; we have never seen a man : that divine 
form we do not yet know, but only the dream 
and prophecy of such: we do not know the 
majestic manners which belong to him, which 
appease and exalt the beholder. We shall 



CHARACTER. 155 

one day see that the most private is the most 
public energy, that quality atones for quantity, 
and grandeur of character acts in the dark, 
and succors them who never saw it. What 
greatness has yet appeared, is beginnings and 
encouragements to us in this direction. The 
history of those gods and saints which the 
world has written, and the worshiped, are doc- 
uments of character. The ages have exulted 
in the manners of a youth who owed nothing 
to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn 
of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his 
nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts 
of his death, which has transfigured every 
particular into a universal symbol for the eyes 
of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our 
highest fact. But the mind requires a victory 
to the senses, a force of character which will 
convert judge, jury, soldier and kings ; which 
will rule animal and mineral virtues, and blend 
with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of 
stars, and of moral agents. 

If we cannot attain at a bound to these 
grandeurs, at least, let us do them homage. 
In society, high advantages are set down to 
the possessor, as disadvantages. It requires 
the more wariness in our private estimates. I 
do not forgive in my friends the failure to 



156 ESSAY V. 

know a fine character, and to entertain it with 
thankful hospitality. When, at last, that 
which we have always longed for, is arrived, 
and shines on us with glad rays out of that far 
celestial land, then to be coarse, then to be 
critical, and treat such a visitant with the jab- 
ber and suspicion of the streets, argues a vul- 
garity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. 
This is confession, this the right insanity, when 
the soul no longer knows its own, nor where 
its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there 
any religion but this, to know that, wherever 
in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment 
we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms 
for me? if none sees it, I see it; I am aware, 
if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst 
it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, 
and suspend my gloom, and my folly and 
jokes. Nature is indulged by the presence of 
this guest. There are many eyes that can 
detect and honor the prudent and household 
virtues ; there are many than can discern Gen- 
ius on his starry track, though the mob is 
incapable; but when that Jove which is all- 
suffering, all-abstaining, all-inspiring, which 
has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and 
also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its 



CHARACTER. 157 

white hands by any compliances, comes into 
our streets and houses, — only the pure and 
aspiring can know its face, and the only com- 
pliment they can pay it, is to own it. 



ESSAY VI. 



MANNERS. 

Half the world, it is said, knows not how 
the other half live. Our Exploring Expedi- 
tion saw the Feejee islanders getting their 
dinner off human bones ; and they are said to 
eat their own wives and children. The hus- 
bandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou 
(west of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault 
To set up their housekeeping, nothing is requi- 
site but two or three earthen pots, a stone to 
grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The 
house, namely, a tomb, is ready without rent 
or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, 
and there is no door, for there is no want of 
one, and there is nothing to lose. If the house 
do not please them, they walk out and enter 
another, as there are several hundreds at their 
command. **It is somewhat singular,*' adds 
Belzoni, to whom we owe this account, **to 
talk of happiness among people who live in 
sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an 
ancient nation which they know nothing of." 

158 



MANNERS. 159 

In the deserts of Borgoo, the rock-Tiboos still 
dwell in caves, like cliff-swallows, and the lan- 
guage of these negroes is compared by their 
neighbors to the shrieking of bats, and to the 
whistling of birds. Again, the Bornoos have 
no proper names; individuals are called after 
their height, thickness, or other accidental 
quality, and have nick-names merely. But 
the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the gold, for 
which these horrible regions are visited, find 
their way into countries where the purchaser 
and consumer can hardly be ranked in one 
race with these cannibals and man-steal ers; 
countries where man serves himself with 
metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk, 
and wool; honors himself with architecture; 
writes laws, and contrives to execute his will 
through the hands of many nations and, 
especially, establishes a select society, run- 
ning through all the countries of intelligent 
men a self-constituted aristocracy, or frater- 
nity of the best, which, without written law or 
exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, 
colonizes every new-planted island, and adopts 
and makes its own whatever personal beauty 
or extraordinary native endowment anywhere 
appears. 

What fact more conspicuous in modern his- 



160 ESSAY VI. 

tory than the creation of the gentleman? Chiv- 
alry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English 
literature, half the drama and all the novels, 
from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, 
paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, 
like the word Christian must hereafter 
characterize the present and the few preceding 
centuries, by the importance attached to it, is 
a homage to personal and incommunicable 
properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions 
have got associated with the name, but the 
steady interest of mankind in it must be attrib- 
uted to the valuable properties which it desig- 
nates. An element which unites all the most 
forcible persons of every country; makes them 
intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is 
somewhat so precise, that it is at once felt if 
an individual lack the masonic sign, cannot be 
any casual product, but must be an average 
result of the character and faculties universally 
found in men. It seems a certain permanent 
average; as the atmosphere is a permanent 
composition, whilst so many gases are com- 
bined only to be decompounded. Comme il 
faut^ is the Frenchman's description of good 
society, as we must be. It is a spontaneous 
fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that 
class who have most vigor, who take the lead 




" The house — namely, a tomb — is ready." — Page 158, 

Emerson's Essays.— Vol. II. 



^_^^^^^g^^_^^ 



MANNERS. 161 

in the world of this hour, and, though far from 
pure, far from constituting the gladdest and 
highest tone of human feeling, is as good as 
the whole society permits it to be. It is made 
of the spirit, more than of the talent of men, 
and is a compound result, into which every 
great force enters as an ingredient, namely, 
virtue, wit, beauty, wealth and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words 
in use to express the excellence of manners 
and social cultivation, because the quantities 
are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed 
by the senses as the cause. The word gentle- 
man has not any correlative abstract to ex- 
press the quality. Gentility is mean, and gen- 
tilesse is obsolete. But we must keep alive in 
the vernacular, the distinction between fash- 
ion, a word of narrow and often sinister mean- 
ing, and the heroic character which the 
gentleman imports. The usual words, how- 
ever, must be respected: they will be found 
to contain the root of the matter. The point 
of distinction in all this class of names, as 
courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, is, 
that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the 
tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is 
the aim this time, and not worth. The result 
is now in question, although our words inti- 



162 ESSAY VI. 

mate well enough the popular feeling, that the 
appearance supposes a substance. The gen- 
tleman is a man of truth, lord of his own 
actions, and expressing that lordship in his 
behavior, not in any manner dependent and 
servile either on persons, or opinions, or pos- 
sessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real 
force, the word denotes good-nature or benev- 
olence: manhood first, and then gentleness. 
The popular notion certainly adds a condition 
of ease and fortune; but that is a natural 
result of personal force and love, that they 
should possess and dispense the goods of the 
world. In times of violence, every eminent 
person must fall in with many opportunities 
to approye his stoutness and worth ; therefore 
every man's name that emerged at all from 
the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in our ear 
like a flourish of trumpets. But personal 
force never goes out of fashion. That is still 
paramount to-day, and, in the moving crowd 
of good society, the men of valor and reality 
are known, and rise to their natural place. 
The competition is transferred from war to 
politics and trade, but the personal force ap- 
pears readily enough in these new arenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics 
and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better 



MANNERS. 163 

promise than talkers and clerks. God knows 
that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door ; 
but whenever used in strictness, and with any 
emphasis, the name will be found to point at 
original energy. It describes a man standing 
in his own right, and working after untaught 
methods. In a good lord, there must first be a 
good animal, at least to the extent of yielding 
the incomparable advantage of animal spirits. 
The ruling class must have more, but they 
must have these, giving in every company the 
sense of power, which makes things easy to be 
done which daunt the wise. The society of the 
energetic class, in their friendly and festive 
meetings is full of courage, and of attempts, 
which intimidate the pale scholar. The cour- 
age which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lun- 
dys Lane, or a sea fight. The intellect relies 
on memory to make some supplies to face these 
extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a 
base mendicant with basket and badge, in the 
presence of these sudden masters. The rulers 
of society must be up to the work of the world, 
and equal to their versatile office : men of the 
right Caesarean pattern, who have great range 
of affinity. I am far from believing the timid 
maxim of Lord Falkland (''that for ceremony 
there must go two to it ; since a bold fellow 



164 ESSAY VI. 

will go through the cunningest forms''), and 
am of the opinion that the gentleman is the 
bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken 
through and only that plenteous nature is 
rightful master, which is the complement of 
whatever person it converses with. My gentle- 
man gives the law where he is ; he will outpray 
saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the 
field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. 
He is good company for pirates, and good with 
academicians ; so that it is useless to fortify 
yourself against him; he has the private en- 
trance to all minds, and I could as easily ex- 
clude myself, as him. The famous gentlemen 
of Asia and Europe have been of this strong 
type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Csesar, 
Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest 
personages. They sat very carelessly in their 
chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to 
value any condition at a high rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in 
the popular judgment to the completion of this 
man of the world ; and it is a material deputy 
which walks through the dance which the first 
has led. Money is not essential, but this wide 
affinity is, which transcends the habits of clique 
and caste, and makes itself felt by men of all 
classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in fash- 



MANNERS. 165 

ionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will 
never be a leader in fashion ; and if the man of 
the people cannot speak on equal terms with 
the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall 
perceive that he is already really of his own 
order, he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Soc- 
rates, and Epaminondas are gentlemen of the 
best blood, who have chosen the condition of 
poverty, when that of wealth was equally open 
to them. I use these old names, but the men 
I speak of are my contemporaries. Fortune 
will not supply to every generation one of 
these well-appointed knights, but every collec- 
tion of men furnishes some example of the 
class ; and the politics of this country, and the 
trade of every town, are controlled by these' 
hardy and irresponsible doers, who have inven- 
tion to take the lead, and a broad sympathy 
which puts them in fellowship with crowds, 
and makes their action popular. 

The manners of this class are observed and 
caught with devotion by men of taste. The 
association of these masters with each other, 
and with men intelligent of their merits, is 
mutually agreeable and stimulating. The good 
forms, the happiest expressions of each, are 
repeated and adopted. By swift consent, 
everything superfluoi^s is dropped, everything 



166 ESSAY VI. 

graceful is renewed. Fine manners show 
themselves formidable to the uncultivated man. 
They are a subtler science of defence to 
parry and intimidate; but once matched by 
the skill of the other party, the}^ drop the point 
of the sword, — points and fences disappear, 
and the youth finds himself in a more trans- 
parent atmosphere, wherein life is a less trou- 
blesome game, and not a misunderstanding 
rises between the players. Manners aid to 
facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, and 
bring the man pure to energize. They aid 
our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids 
traveling, by getting rid of all avoidable ob- 
structions of the road, and leaving nothing to 
be conquered but pure space. These forms 
very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of 
propriety is cultivated with the more heed, 
that it becomes a badge of social and civil dis- 
tinctions. Thus grows up Fashion, an equiv- 
ocal semblance, the most puissant, the most 
fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and 
followed, and which mortals and violence 
assault in vain. 

There exists a strict relation between the 
class of power, and the exclusive and polished 
circles. The last are always filled or filling 
from the first. The strong men usually give 



MANNERS. 187 

some allowance even to the petulances of 
fashion, for that affinity they find in it. Na- 
poleon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the 
old noblesse, never ceased to court the Fau- 
bourg St. Germain : doubtless with the feeling, 
that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. 
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents 
all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it 
is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not 
often caress the great, but the children of the 
great : it is a hall of the Past It usually sets 
its face against the great of this hour. Great 
men are not commonly in its halls: they are 
absent in the field ; they are working, not tri- 
umphing. Fashion is made up of their 
children; of those who, through the value and 
virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to 
.their name, marks of distinction, means of 
cultivation and generosity, and, in their phy- 
sical organization, a certain health and excel- 
lence which secures to them if not the highest 
power to work yet high power to enjoy. The 
class of power, the working heroes, the Cortez, 
the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the 
festivity and permanent celebration of such 
as they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mex- 
ico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin ; 
that the brilliant names of fashion run back to 



168 ESSAY VI. 

just such busy names as their own fifty or 
sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their 
sons shall be the reapers, and their sons in the 
ordinary course of things must yield the pos- 
session of the harvest to new competitors with 
keener eyes and stronger frames. The city is 
recruited from the country. In the year 1805 
it is said every legitimate monarch in Europe 
was imbecile. The city would have died out 
rotted, and exploded long ago but that it was 
reinforced from the fields. It is only country 
which came to town day before yesterday, that 
is city and court to-day. 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable 
results. These mutual selections are inde- 
structible. If they provoke anger in the least 
favored class, and the excluded majority re- 
venge themselves on the excluding minority, 
by the strong hand, and kill them, at once a 
new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as 
cream rises in a bowl of milk: and if the peo- 
ple should destroy class after class, until two 
men only were left, one of these would be the 
leader, and would be involuntarily served and 
copied by the other. You may keep this 
minority out of sight and out of mind, but it 
is tenacious of life, and is one of the estates of 
the realm. I am the more struck with this 



MANNERS. 169 

tenacity, when I see its work. It respects the 
administration of such unimportant matters 
that we should not look for any durability in 
its rule. We sometimes meet men under some 
strong moral influence, as, a patriotic, a lit- 
erary, a religious movement and feel that the 
moral sentiment rules man and nature. We 
think all other distinctions and ties will be 
slight and fugitive, this of caste or fashion for 
example ; yet come from year to year and see 
how permanent that is, in this Boston or New 
York life of man, where, too, it has not the 
least countenance from the law of the land. 
Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more 
impassable line. Here are associations 
whose ties go over and under, and through it, 
a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a 
college class, a fire-club, a professional associa- 
tion, a political, a religious convention; — the 
persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, 
that assembly once dispersed, its members will 
not in the year meet again. Each returns to 
his degree in the scale of good society, por- 
celain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. 
The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or 
fashion may be objectless, but the nature of 
this union and selection can be neither frivol- 
ous nor accidental. Each man's rank in that 



170 ESSAY VI. 

perfect graduation depends on some symmetry 
in his structure, or some agreement in his 
structure to the symmetry of society. Its 
doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim 
of. their own kind. A natural gentleman 
finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patri- 
cian out, who has lost his intrinsic rank. 
Fashion understands itself; good breeding and 
personal superiority of whatsoever country 
readily fraternize with those of every other. 
The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished 
themselves in London and Paris, by the purity 
of their tournure. 

To say what good of fashion we can, — it rest^ 
on reality, and hates nothing so much as pre- 
tenders; — to exclude and mystify pretenders, 
and send them into everlasting "Coventry/* 
is its delight. We contemn, in turn, every 
other gift of men of the world ; but the habit 
even in little and the least matters, of not 
appealing to any but our own sense of propri- 
ety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. 
There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it 
be sane and proportioned, which fashion does 
not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom 
of its saloons. A sainted soul is always 
elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged 
into the most guarded ring. But so will Jock 






MANNERS. 171 

the teamster pass, in some crisis that orings 
him thither, and find favor, as long as his head 
is not giddy with the new circumstance, and 
the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes 
and cotillions. For there is nothing settled in 
manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the 
energy of the individual. The maiden at her 
first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, 
believes that there is a ritual according to 
which every act and compliment must be per- 
formed, or the failing party must be cast out 
of this presence. Later, they learn that good 
sense and character make their own forms 
every moment, and speak or abstain, take 
wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or 
sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on 
their head, or what else soever, in a new and 
aboriginal way: and that strong will is always 
in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All 
that fashion demands is composure, and self- 
content. A circle of men perfectly well-bred 
would be a company of sensible persons, in 
which every man's native manners and charac- 
ter appeared. If the fashionist have not this 
quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of 
self-reliance, that we excuse in a man many 
sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction 
in his position, which asks no leave to be, of 



172 ESSAY VI. 

mine, or any man's good opinion. But any 
deference to some eminent man or woman of 
the world forfeits all privilege of nobility. 
He is an underling : I have nothing to do with 
him ; I will speak with his master. A man 
should not go where he cannot carry his whole 
sphere or society with him, — not bodily, the 
whole circle of his friends, but atmospheric- 
ally. He should preserve in a new company 
the same attitude of mind and reality of rela- 
tion, which his daily associates draw him to, 
else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be 
an orphan in the merriest club. "If you 
could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on! — ** 
But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his be- 
longings in some fashion, if not added as 
honor, then severed as disgrace. 

There will always be in society certain per- 
sons who are mercuries of its approbation, and 
whose glance will at any time determine for 
the curious their standing in the world. These 
are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. 
Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with 
the loftier deities, and allow them all their 
privilege. They are clear in their office, nor 
could they be thus formidable, without their 
own merits. But do not measure the impor- 
tance of this class by their pretension, or 



MANNERS. 173 

imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of 
honor and shame. They pass also at their 
just rate: for how can they otherwise, in 
circles which exist as a sort of herald's office 
for the sifting of character? 

As the first thing man requires of man is 
reality, so that appears in all forms of society. 
We pointedly, and by name, introduce the 
parties to each other. Know you before all 
heaven and earth, that this is Andrew, and 
this is Gregory ; — they look each other in the 
eye; and grasp each other's hand, to identify 
and signalize each other. It is a great satisfac- 
tion. A gentleman never dodges: his eyes 
look straight forward, and he assures the other 
party, first of all, that he has been met. For 
what is it that we seek, in so many visits and 
hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures, 
and decorations? Or, do we not insatiably ask, 
Was a man in the house? I may easily go 
into a great household where there is much 
substance, excellent provision for comfort, 
luxury and taste, and yet not encounter there 
any Amphitryon, who shall subordinate these 
appendages. I may go into a cottage, and 
find a farmer who feels that he is the man I 
have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. 
It was therefore a very natural point of old 



174 ESSAY VI. 

feudal etiquette, that a gentleman who re- 
ceived a visit, though it were of his sovereign, 
should not leave his roof, but should wait his 
arrival at the door of his house. No house, 
though it were the Tuileries, or the Escurial 
is good for anything without a master. And 
yet we are not often gratified by this hospi- 
tality. Everybody we know surrounds himself 
with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, 
gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as 
screens to interpose between himself and his 
guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a 
very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing 
so much as a full encounter front to front with 
his fellow? It were unmerciful, I know, quite 
to abolish the use of these screens, which are 
of eminent convenience, whether the guest is 
too great, or too little. We call together many 
friends who keep each other in play, or, by 
luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young 
people, and guard our retirement. Or if, per- 
chance, a searching realist comes to our gate, 
before whose eye we have no care to stand, 
then again w^e run to our curtain, and hide 
ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord 
God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the 
Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself from 
the glances of Napoleon, by an immense pair 



MANNERS. 175 

of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked 
them, and speedily managed to rally them off: 
and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great 
enough with eight hundred thousand troops a 
his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but 
fenced himself with etiquette, and within 
triple barriers of reserve: and, as all the 
world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, 
when he found himself observed, to discharge 
his face of all expression. But emperors and 
rich men are by no means the most skilful mas- 
ters of good manners. No rent-roll nor army 
list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: 
and the first point of courtesy must always be 
truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding 
point that way. 

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's 
translation, Montaigne's account of his journey 
into Italy, and am struck with nothing more 
agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of 
the time. His arrival in each place, the arri- 
val of a gentleman of France, is an event of 
some consequence. Wherever he goes, he pays 
a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note 
resides upon his road, as a duty to himself and 
to civilization. When he leaves any house in 
which he has lodged for a few weeks, he causes 
his arms to be painted and hung up as a per- 



176 ESSAY VI. 

petual sign to the house, as was the custom of 
gentlemen. 

The complement of this graceful self- 
respect, and that of all the points of good 
breeding I most require and insist upon, is 
deference. I like that every chair should be a 
throne, and hold a king. I prefer a tendency 
to stateliness, to an excess of fellowship. Let 
the incommunicable objects of nature and the 
metaphysical isolation of man teach us inde- 
pendence. Let us not be too much acquainted. 
I would have a man enter his house through a 
hall filled v/ith heroic and sacred sculptures, 
that he might not want the hint of tranquillity 
and self-poise. We should meet each morning, 
as from foreign countries, and spending the 
day together, should depart at night, as into 
foreign countries. In all things I would have 
the island of man inviolate. Let us sit apart 
as the gods, talking from peak to peak all 
around Olympus. No degree of affection need 
invade this religion. This is myrrh and rose- 
mary to keep the other sweet. Lovers should 
guard their strangeness. If they forgive too 
much, all slides into confusion and meanness. 
It is easy to push this deference to a Chinese 
etiquette; but coolness and absence of heat 
and haste indicate fine qualities. A gentleman 



MANNERS. 177 

makes no noise ; a lady is serene. Proportion- 
ate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a 
studious house with blast and running, to se- 
cure some paltry convenience. Not less I dis- 
like a low sympathy of each with his neighbor's 
needs. Must we have a good understanding 
with one another's palates? as foolish people 
who have lived long together, know when each 
wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if 
he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and 
if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me 
for them, and not to hold out his plate, as if I 
knew already. Every natural function can be 
dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us 
leave hurry to slaves. The compliments and 
ceremonies of our breeding should signify, 
however remotely, the recollections of the 
grandeur of our destiny. 

The flower of courtesy does not very well 
bide handling, but if we dare to open another 
leaf, and explore what parts go to its confor- 
mation, we shall find also an intellectual qual- 
ity. To the leaders of men, the brain as well 
as the flesh and the heart must furnish a pro- 
portion. Defect in manners is usually the de- 
fect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely 
made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and 
cUvStoms. It is not quite sufficient to good- 

12 



178 ESSAY VI. 

breeding, a union of kindness and independ- 
ence. We imperatively require a perception 
of, and a homage to beauty in our compan- 
ions. Other virtues are in request in the field 
and work-yard, but a certain degree of taste is 
not to be spared in, those we sit with. I could 
better eat with one who did not respect the 
truth of the laws, than with a sloven and un- 
presentable person. Moral qualities rule the 
world, but at short distances the senses are 
despotic. The same discrimination of fit and 
fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts 
of life. The average spirit of the energetic 
class is good sense, acting under certain limi- 
tations and to certain ends. It entertains 
every natural gift. Social in its nature, it re- 
spects everything which tends to unite men. 
It delights in measure. The love of beauty is 
mainly the love of measure or proportion. 
The person who screams, or uses the superla- 
tive degree, or converses with heat, puts whole 
drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be 
loved, love measure. You must have genius, 
or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the 
want of measure. This perception comes in 
to polish and perfect the parts of the social in- 
strument. Society will pardon much to genius 
and special gifts, but, being in its nature a con- 



MANNERS. 179 

vention, it loves what is conventional, or what 
belongs to coming together. That makes the 
good and bad of manners, namely, what helps 
or hinders fellowship. For fashion is not good 
sense absolute, but relative; not good sense 
private, but good sense entertaining company. 
It hates corners and sharp points of character, 
these quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and 
gloomy people ; hates whatever can interfere 
with total blending of parties ; whilst it values 
all peculiarities as in the highest degree re- 
freshing, which can consist with good fellow- 
ship. And besides the general infusion of wit 
to heighten civility, the direct splendor of in- 
tellectual power is ever welcome in fine soci- 
ety as the costliest addition to its rule and its 
credit. 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our fes- 
tival, but it must be tempered and shaded, or 
that will also offend. Accuracy is essential to 
beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, 
but not too quick perceptions. One may be 
too punctual and too precise. He must leave 
the omniscience of business at the door, when 
he comes in the palace of beauty. Society 
loves Creole natures, and sleepy, languishing 
manners, so that they cover sense, grace, and 
good- will; the air of drowsy strength, which 



180 ESSAY VI, 

disarms criticism; perhaps, because such a 
person seems to reserve himself for the best of 
the game, and not spend himself on surfaces; 
an ignoring eye, which does not see the annoy- 
ances, shifts, and inconveniences, that cloud 
the brow and smother the voice of the sensi- 
tive. 

Therefore, beside personal force and so much 
perception as constitutes unerring taste, society 
demands in its patrician class another element 
already intimated, which it significantly terms 
good-nature, expressing all degree of generos- 
ity, from the lowest willingness and faculty to 
oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity and 
love. Insight we must have, or we shall run 
against one another, and miss the way to our 
food; but intelligence is selfish and barren. 
The secret of success in society is a certain 
heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not 
happy in the company cannot find any word in 
his memory that will fit the occasion. All his 
information is a little impertinent. A man 
who is happy there finds in every turn of the 
conversation equally lucky occasions for the 
introduction of that which he has to say. The 
favorites of society, and what it calls whole 
souls, are able men, and of more spirit than 
wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but 



MANNERS. 181 

who exactly fill the hour and the company, con- 
tented and contenting, at a marriage or a fu- 
neral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shoot- 
ing-match. England, which is rich in gentle- 
men, furnished, in the beginning of the present 
century, a good model of that genius which the 
world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his 
great abilities the most social disposition, and 
real love of men. Parliamentary history has 
few better passages than the debate, in which 
Burke and Fox separated in the House of Com- 
mons ; when Fox urged on his old friend the 
claims of old friendship with such tenderness, 
that the house was moved to tears. Another 
anecdote is so close to my matter, that I must 
hazard the story. A tradesman who had long 
dunned him for a note of three hundred 
guineas, found him one day counting gold, 
and demanded payment: ' 'No, *' said Fox, '*I 
owe this money to Sheridan ; it is a debt of 
honor; if an accident should happen to me, he 
has nothing to show.'' **Then/' said the 
creditor, *'I change my debt into a debt of 
honor," and tore the notes in pieces. Fox 
thanked the man for his confidence, and paid 
him, saying, **his debt was of older standing, 
and Sheridan must wait. * * Lover of liberty, 
friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African 



182 ESSAY VI. 

slave, he possessed a great personal popularity ; 
and Napoleon said of him on the occasion of 
his visit to Paris, in 1805: *'Mr. Fox will al- 
ways hold the first place in an assembly at the 
Tuileries." 

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy 
o£ courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence 
as its foundation. The painted phantasm Fash- 
ion rises to cast a species of derision on what 
we say. But I will neither be driven from 
some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic insti- 
tution, nor from the belief that love is the basis 
of courtesy. We must obtain that, if we can; 
but by all means we must affirm this. Life 
owes much of its spirit to these sharp con- 
trasts. Fashion which affects to be honor is 
often, in all men's experience, only a ball-room 
code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, 
in the imagination of the best heads on the 
planet, there is something necessary and ex- 
cellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that 
men have agreed to be the dupes of anything 
preposterous; and the respect which these 
mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan 
characters, and the curiosity with which details 
of high life are read, betray the universality 
of the love of cultivated manners. I know that 
a comic disparity would be left, if we should 



MANNERS. 183 

enter the acknowledged * 'first circles" and 
apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, 
and benefit to the individuals found there. 
Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these 
gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and 
many rules of probation and admission ; and 
not the best alone. There is not only the 
right of conquest, which genius pretends, — the 
individual, demonstrating his natural aristoc- 
racy best of the best ; — but less claims will pass 
for the time; for Fashion loves lions, and 
points, like Circe, to her horned company. 
This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from 
Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride, who 
came yesterday from Bagdad: here is Captain 
Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and Captain 
Symmes, from the interior of the earth ; and 
Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morn- 
ing in a balloon ; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer, 
and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the 
whole torrid zone in his Sunday-school ; in Sig- 
nor Torre del Greco, who. extinguished Vesu- 
vius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples; 
Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil 
Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose sad- 
dle is the new moon. — But these are monsters 
of one day, and to-morrow will be dismissed 
to their holes and dens ; for, in these rooms, 



184 ESSAY VI. 

every chair is waited for. The artist, the 
scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, wins its 
way up into these places, and gets represented 
here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. 
Another mode is to pass through all the de- 
grees, spending a year and a day in St. Mich- 
ael's Square, being steeped in Cologne water, 
and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and 
properly grounded in all the biography, and 
politics, and anecdotes of the boudoirs. 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. 
Let there be grotesque sculpture about the 
gates and offices of temples. Let the creed 
and commandments even have the saucy hom- 
age of parody. The forms of politeness uni- 
versally express benevolence in superlative de- 
grees. What if they are in the mouths of self- 
ish men, and used as means of selfishness? 
What if the false gentleman almost bows the 
true out of the world? What if the false gen- 
tleman contrives so to address his companion, 
as civilly to exclude all others from his dis- 
course, and also to make them feel excluded? 
Real service will not lose its nobleness. All 
generosity is not merely French and senti- 
mental, nor is it to be concealed, that living 
blood and a passion of kindness does at last 
distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's. 



MANNERS. 185 

The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly 
unintelligible to the present age. *'Here lies 
Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and 
persuaded his enemy; what his mouth ate, his 
hand paid for; what his servants robbed, he 
restored ; if a woman gave him pleasure, he 
supported her in pain ; he never forgot his chil- 
dren; and who so touched his finger, drew 
after it. his whole body. ' ' Even the line of 
heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still 
ever some admirable person in plain clothes, 
standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue 
a drowning man ; there is still some absurd 
inventor of charities; some guide and com- 
forter of runaway slaves; some friend of 
Poland; some Philhellene; some fanatic who 
plants shade-trees for the second and third 
generation, and orchards when he is grown old ; 
some well-concealed piety, some just man 
happy in an ill-fame ; some youth ashamed of 
the favors of fortune, and impatiently casting 
them on other shoulders. And these are the 
centers of society, on which it returns for fresh 
impulses. These are the creators of Fashion, 
which is an attempt to organize beauty of be- 
havior. The beautiful and the generous are, 
in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this 
church; Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip 



186 ESSAY VI. 

Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and 
valiant heart, who worshiped Beauty by word 
and by deed. The persons who constitute the 
natural aristocracy are not found in the actual 
-aristocracy, or, only on its edge; as the 
chemical energy of the spectrum is found 
to be greatest just outside of the spectrum. 
Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, who 
do not know their sovereign, when he appears. 
The theory of society supposes the existence 
and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off 
their coming. It says with the elder gods, — 

* * As Heaven and Earth are fairer far 
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs ; 
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth, 
In form and shape compact and beautiful ; 
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads; 
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us, 
And fated to excel us, as we pass 
In glory that old Darkness : 
* * * for *tis the eternal law. 
That first in beauty shall be first in might.** 

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good 
society, there is a narrower and higher circle, 
concentration of its light, and flower of cour- 
tesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of 
pride and reference, as to its inner and impe- 
rial court, the parliament of love and chivalry. 
And this is constituted of those persons in 
whom heroic dispositions are native, with the 



MANNERS. 187 

love of beauty, the delight in society, and the 
power to embellish the passing day. If the in- 
dividuals who compose the purest circles of 
aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of 
centuries, should pass in review, in such man- 
ner as that we could, at leisure, and critically 
inspect their behavior, we might find no gen- 
tleman, and no lady; for, although excellent 
specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would 
gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars 
we should detect offence. Because, elegance 
comes of no breeding, but of birth. There 
must be romance of character, or the most fas- 
tidious exclusion of impertinence will not 
avail. It must be genius which takes that 
direction ; it must be not courteous, but cour- 
tesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as it 
is in fact Scott is praise'd for the fidelity with 
which he painted the demeanor and conversa- 
tion of the superior classes. Certainly, kings 
and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some 
right to complain of the absurdity that had 
been put in their mouths, before the days of 
Waverly ; but neither does Scott's dialogue bear 
criticism. His lords brave each other in smart 
epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in 
costume, and does not please on the second 
reading; it is not warm with life. In Shake- 



188 ESSAY VI. 

speare alone, the speakers do not strut and 
bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he 
adds to so many titles that of being the best- 
bred man in England, and in Christendom. 
Once or twice in a life-time we are permitted 
to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the 
presence of a man or woman who have no bar 
in their nature, but whose character emanates 
freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful 
form is better than a beautiful face ; a beauti- 
ful behavior is better than a beautiful form ; it 
gives a higher pleasure than statues or pic- 
tures; it is the finest of the fine arts. A man 
is but a little thing in the midst of the objects 
of nature, yet by the moral quality radiating 
from his countenance, he may abolish all con- 
siderations of magnitude, and in his manners 
equal the majesty of the world. I have seen- 
an individual, whose manners, though wholly 
within the conventions of elegant society, were 
never learned there^ but were original and com- 
manding, and held out protection and prosper- 
ity ; one who did not need the aid of a court- 
suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who 
exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the 
doors of new modes of existence ; who shook 
off the activity of etiquette, with happy, spir- 
ited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin 



MANNERS. 189 

Hood; yet with the port of an emperor, — if 
need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze 
of millions. 

The open air and the fields, the street and 
public chambers, are the places where Man ex- 
ecutes his will; let him yield or divide the 
sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, 
with her instinct of behavior, instantly detects 
in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbe- 
cility, or, in short, any want of that large, flow- 
ing, and magnanimous deportment, which is 
indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our 
American institutions have been friendly to 
her, and at this moment I esteem it a chief 
felicity of this country, thatit excels in women. 
A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority 
in the men may give rise to the new chivalry 
in behalf of Woman's Rights. Certainly, let 
her be as much better placed in the laws and 
in social forms as the most zealous reformer 
can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspir- 
ing and musical nature, that I believe only 
herself can show us how she shall be served. 
The wonderful generosity of her sentiments 
raises her at times into heroical and godlike 
regions and verifies the pictures of Minerva, 
Juno, or Polymnia; and, by the firmness with 
which she treads her upward path, she con- 



190 ESSAY VI. 

vinces the coarsest calculators that another 
road exists, than that which their feet know. 
But besides those who make good in our imag- 
ination the place of muses and of Delphic 
Sibyls, are there not women who fill our vase 
with wine and roses to the brim, so that the 
wine runs over and fills the house with perfume ; 
who inspire us with courtesy; who unloose 
our tongues, and we speak ; who anoint our 
eyes, and we see? We say things we never 
thought to have said ; for once our walls of 
habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large ; 
we were children playing with children in a 
wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in 
these influences, for days, for weeks, and we 
shall be sunny poets, and will write out in 
many-colored words the romance that 3^ou are. 
Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Per- 
sian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and 
astonished me by her amount of life, when I 
saw her day after day radiating, every instant, 
redundant joy and grace on all around her. 
She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all 
heterogeneous persons into one society; like 
air or water, an element of such a great range 
of affinities, that it combines readily with a 
thousand substances. Where she is present, 
all others will be more than they are wont. 



MANNERS. 191 

She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever 
she did, became her. She had too much sym- 
pathy and desire to please, than that you could 
say, her manners were marked with dignity; 
yet no princess could surpass her clear and 
erect demeanor on each occasion. She did not 
study the Persian grammar, nor the books of 
the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven 
seemed to be written upon her. For, though 
the bias of her nature was not to thought, but 
to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own 
nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the 
fulness of her heart, warming them by her 
sentiments; believing, as she did, that by deal- 
ing nobly with all, all could show themselves 
noble. 

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry 
or Fashion which seems so fair and picturesque 
to those who look at the contemporary facts for 
science or for entertainment, is not equally 
pleasant to all spectators. The constitution 
of our society makes it a giant^s castle to 
the ambitious youth who have not found their 
names enrolled in its Golden Book, and whom 
it has excluded from its coveted honors and 
privileges. They have yet to learn that its 
seeming grandeur is shadowy and relative; it 
is great by their allowance ; its proudest gates 



192 ESSAY VI. 

will fly open at the approach of their courage 
and virtue. For the present distress, how- 
ever, of those who are predisposed to suffer 
from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are 
easy remedies. To move your residence a 
couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly 
relieve the most supreme susceptibility. For, 
the advantages which fashion values are plants 
which thrive in very confined localities, in a 
few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, 
they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, 
in the forest, in the market, in war, in the 
nuptial society, in the literary or scientific cir- 
cle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of 
thought or virtue. 

But we have lingered long enough in these 
painted courts. The worth of the thing signi- 
fied must vindicate our taste for the emblem. 
Everything that is called fashion and courtesy 
humbles itself before the cause and fountain 
of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely, 
the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this 
the fire, which, in all countries and contingen- 
cies, will work after its kind, and conquer and 
expand all that approaches it. This gives new 
meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the 
rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What 
is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? 



MANNERS. 193 

to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? 
rich enough to make the Canadian in his 
wagon, the itinerant with his consults paper 
which commends him **To the charitable/* the 
swarthy Italian with his few broken words of 
English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers 
from town to town, even the poor insane or 
besotted wreck of man or woman feel the noble 
exception of your presence and your house, 
from the general bleakness and stoniness; to 
make such feel that they were greeted with a 
voice which made them both remember and 
hope? What is vulgar, but to refuse the claim 
on acute and conclusive reasons? What is gen- 
tle, but to allow it, and give their heart and 
yours one holiday from the national caution? 
Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beg- 
gar. The king of Schiraz could not afford to 
be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt 
at his gate. Osman has a humanity so broad 
and deep, that although his speech was so bold 
and free with the Koran, as to disgust all the 
dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, 
eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had 
cut off his beard, or who had been mutilated 
under a vow, or had a pet madness in his 
brain, but fled at once to him, that great heart 
lay there so sunny and hospitable in the cen» 

18 



394 ESSAY VI. 

ter of the country, — that it seemed as if the 
instinct of all sufferers drew them to his side. 
And the madness which he harbored, he did 
not share. Is not this to be rich? this only to 
Tdc rightly rich? 

But I shall hear without pain, that I play the 
courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do 
not well understand. It is easy to see, that 
what is called by distinction society and fash- 
ion, has good laws as well as bad, has much 
that is necessary, and much that is absurd. 
Too good for banning, and too bad for bless- 
ing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan 
mythology, in any attempt to settle its charac- 
ter. *'I overhieard Jove, one day," said Sile- 
nus, ''talking of destroying the earth; he said, 
it had failed ; they were all rogues and vizens, 
who went from bad to worse, as fast as the 
days succeeded each other. Minerva said, she 
hoped not; they were only ridiculous little 
creatures, with this odd circumstance, that 
they had a blur, or undeterminable aspect, 
seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, 
they would appear so.;; if you called them good, 
they would appear -so ; and there was no one 
person or action among them, which would not 
puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to 
know whether it w.as fundamentally bad or 
tRfood. " 



ESSAY VIL 



GIFTS. 

It is said that the world is in a state of bank- 
ruptcy, that the world owes the world more 
than the world can pay, and ought to go into 
chancery, and be sold. I do not think this 
general insolvency, which involves in some 
part all the population, to be the reason of 
the difficulty experienced at Christmas and 
New Year, and other times, in bestowing 
gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be 
generous, though very vexatious in the 
choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my 
head, that a present is due from me to some- 
body, I am puzzled what to give, until the 
opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are 
all fit presents; flowers, because they are a 
proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues 
all the utilities of the world. These gay 
natures contrast with the somewhat stern 
countenance of ordinary nature : they are like 
music heard out of a work-house. Nature 
does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: 

195 



196 ESSAY VII. 

she is not fond : everything is dealt to ns 
without fear or favor, after severe universal 
laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the 
frolic and interference of love and beauty. 
Men use to tell us that we love flattery, even 
though we are not deceived by it, because it 
shows that we are of importance enough to be 
courted. Something like that pleasure the 
flowers give us: what am I to whom these 
sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are accep- 
table gifts, because they are the flower of com- 
modities, and admit of fantastic values being 
attached to them. If a man should send to me 
to come a hundred miles to visit him, and 
should set before me a basket of fine summer- 
fruit, I should think there was some propor- 
tion between the labor and the reward. 

For common gifts, necessity makes perti- 
nences and beauty every day, and one is glad 
when an imperative leaves him no option, 
since if the man at the door have no shoes, 
you have not to consider whether you could 
procure him a paint-box. And as it is always 
pleasing to see a man eat bread or drink 
water, in the house or out of doors, so it is 
always a great satisfaction to supply these first 
wants. Necessity does everything well. In 
our condition of universal dependence, it 



GIFTS. 197 

seems heroic to let the petitioner be the 
judge o£ his necessity, and to give all that is 
asked, though at great inconvenience. If 
it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to 
others the office of punishing him. I can 
think of many parts I should prefer playing to 
that of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, 
the rule for a gift, which one of my friends pre- 
scribed, is, that we might convey to some 
person that which properly belonged to his 
character, and was easily associated with him 
in thought. But our tokens of compliment 
and love are for the most part barbarous. 
Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but 
apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion 
of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. There- 
fore the poet brings his poem ; the shepherd, 
his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a 
gem ; the sailor, coral and shells ; the painter, 
his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her 
own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for 
it restores society in so far to its primary basis 
when a man*s biography is conveyed in his 
gift, and every man's wealth is an index of his 
merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when 
you go to the shops to buy me something, 
which does not represent your life and talent, 
but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings, and 



198 ESSAY VII. 

rich men who represent kings, and a false 
state of property, to make presents of gold 
and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin- 
offering, or payment of blackmail. 

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, 
which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. 
It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. 
How dare you give them? We wish to be self- 
sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. 
The hand that feeds us is in some danger of 
being bitten. We can receive anything from 
love, for that is a way of receiving it from our- 
selves; but not from any one who assumes to 
bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which 
we eat, because there seems something of 
degrading dependence in living by it. 

* 'Brother, if Jove to thee a present make, 
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take.** 

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content 
us. We arraign society, if it do not give us 
besides earth, and fire, and water, oppor- 
tunity, love, reverence, and objects of vener- 
ation. 

He is a good man who can receive a gift 
well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, 
and both emotions are unbecoming. Some 
violence, I think, is done, some degradation 
borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I 



GIFTS. 199 

am sorry when my independence is invaded, 
or when a gift comes from such as do not know 
my spirit, and so the act is not supported ; and 
if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should 
be ashamed that the donor should read my 
heart, and see that I love his commodity, and 
not him. The gift, to be true, must be the 
flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to 
my flowing unto him. When the waters are 
at a level, then my goods pass to him, and his 
to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say 
to him, How can you give me this pot of oil, 
or this flagon of wine, when all your oil and 
wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift 
seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beauti- 
ful, not useful things "for gifts. This giving is 
flat UvSurpation, and therefore when the benefi- 
ciary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all 
Timons, not at all considering the value of 
the gift, but looking back to the greater store 
it was taken from, I rather sympathize with 
the beneficiary, than with the anger of my 
lord Timon. For, the expectation of grati- 
tude is mean, and is continually punished by 
the total insensibility of the obliged person. 
It is a great happiness to get off without 
injury and heart-burning, from one who has 
had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a 



2Q0 ESSAY VII. 

very onerous business, this of being served, 
and the debtor naturally wishes to give you 
a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is 
that which I so admire in the Buddhist, 
who never thanks, and who says, "Do not 
flatter your benefactors." 

The reason of these discords I conceive to 
be, that there is no commensurability be- 
tween a man and any gift. You cannot give 
anything to a magnanimous person. After 
you have served him, he at once puts you in 
debt by his magnanimity. The service a man 
renders his friend is trivial and selfish, com- 
pared with the service he knows his friend 
stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he 
had begun to serve his friend, and now also. 
Compared with that good-will I bear my 
friend, the benefit it is in my power to render 
him seems small. Besides, our action on each 
other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and 
at random that we can seldom hear the ac- 
knowledgments of any person who would 
thank us for a benefit, without some shame 
and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct 
stroke, but must be content with an oblique 
one ; we seldom have the satisfaction of yield- 
ing a direct benefit, which is directly received. 
But rectitude scatters favors on every side 



GIFTS. 201 

without knowing it, and receives with wonder 
the thanks of all people. 

I fear to breathe any treason against the 
majesty of love, which is the genius and god 
of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to 
prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower- 
leaves indifferently. There are persons from 
whom we always expect fairy tokens; let us 
not cease to expect them. This is preroga- 
tive, and not to be limited by our municipal 
rules. For the rest, I like to see that we can- 
not be bought and sold. The best of hospital- 
ity and of generosity is also not in the will, but 
in fate. I find that I am not much to you ; you 
do not need me; you do not feel me; then am 
I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me 
house and lands. No services are of any value, 
but only likeness. When I have attempted 
to join myself to others by services, it proved 
an intellectual trick, — no more. They eat your 
service like apples, 'and leave you out. But 
love them, and they feel you, and delight in 
you all the tiine. 



ESSAY VIII. 



NATURE. 

There are days which occur in this climate, 
at almost any season of the year, wherein the 
world reaches its perfection, when the air, the 
heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a har- 
mony, as if nature would indulge her off- 
spring ; when, in these bleak upper sides of the 
planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard 
of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the 
shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when 
everything that has life gives signs of satis- 
faction, and the cattle that lie on the ground 
seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. 
These halcyons may be looked for with a little 
more assurance in that pure October weather, 
which we distinguish by the name of the 
Indian Summer. The day, immeasurably 
long, sleeps over the broad hills and warms 
wide fields. To have lived through all its 
sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The 
solitary places do not seem quite lonely. /At 
the gates of the forest, the surprised man of 

202 



NATURE. 203 

the world is forced to leave his city estimates 
of great and small, wise and foolish. ) The 
knapsack of custom falls off his back with the 
first step he makes into these precincts. Here 
is sanctity which shames our religions, and 
reality which discredits our heroes. Here 
we find nature to be the circumstance which 
dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges 
like a god all men that come to her. We have 
crept out of our close and crowded houses into 
the night and morning, and we see what ma- 
jestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. 
How willingly we would escape the barriers 
which render them comparatively impotent, 
escape the sophistication and second thought, 
and suffer nature to entrance us. The tem- 
pered light of the woods is like a perpetual 
morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The 
anciently reported spells of these places creep 
on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and 
oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. 
The incommunicable trees begin to persuade 
us to live with them, and quit our life of sol- 
emn trifles. Here no history, or church, or 
state, is interpolated in the divine sky and the 
immortal year. How easily we might walk 
onward into the opening landscape, absorbed 
by new pictures, and by thoughts fast sue- 



204 ESSAY VIII. 

ceeding each other, until by degrees the recol- 
lection of home was crowded out of the mind, 
all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the 
present, and we were led in triumph by nature. 
The enchantments are medicinal, they sober 
and heal us. These are plain pleasures, 
kindly and native to us. We come to our own, 
and make friends with matter, which the 
ambitious chatter of the schools would per- 
suade us to despise. We never can part with 
it; the mind loves its old home: as water to 
our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our 
eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: 
it is cold flame: what health, what affinity! 
Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and 
brother, when we chat affectedly with stran- 
gers, comes in this honest face, and takes a 
grave liberty with us, and shames us out of 
our nonsense. ^^ Cities give not the human 
senses room enough. We go out daily and 
nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, " and 
require so much scope, just as we need water 
for our bath. There are all degrees of natural 
influence, from these quarantine powers of 
nature, up to her dearest and gravest minis- 
trations to the imagination and the soul. 
There is the bucket of cold water from the 
spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled trav- 



NATURE. 205 

eler rushes for safety, — and there is the sub- 
lime moral of autumn and of noon. ; We nestle 
in nature, and draw our living as parasites 
from her roots and grains, and we receive 
glances from the heavenly bodies, which call 
us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. 
The blue zenith is the point in which romance 
and reality meet. I think, if we should be 
rapt away mto all that we dream of heaven, 
and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, 
the upper sky would be all that would remain 
of our furniture. 

It seems as if the day was not wholly pro- 
fane, in which we have given heed to some 
natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a 
still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect 
form ; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet 
of water, and over plains, the waving rye 
field, the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, 
whose innumerable flowrets whiten and ripple 
before the eye; the reflections of trees and 
flowers in glassy lakes ;/the musical, steaming 
odorous south wind, which converts all trees 
to windharps; the crackling and spurting of 
hemlock in the flames ; or of pine logs, which 
yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting- 
room, — these are the music and pictures of the 
most ancient religion.) My house stands in 



206; ESSAY VIII. 

low land, with limited outlook, and on the 
skirt of the village. ^ But I go with my friend 
to the shore of our little river, and with one 
stroke of the paddle, I leave the village poli- 
tics and personalities, yes, and the world of 
villages and personalities behind, and pass 
into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, 
too bright almost for spotted man to enter 
without novitiate and probation. We pene- 
trate bodily this incredible beauty: we dip 
our hands in this painted element: our eyes 
are bathed in these lights and forms. A holi- 
day a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, 
most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and 
beauty, power and taste, ever decked and 
enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant 
These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging 
stars, with their private and ineffable glances, 
signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poor- 
ness of our invention, the ugliness of towns 
and palaces. Art and luxury have early 
learned that they must work as enchantment 
and sequel to this original beauty. I am 
overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I 
shall be hard to please. I cannot go back 
to toys. I am grown expensive and sophis- 
ticated. I can no longer live without ele- 
gance: but a countryman shall be my master 



NATURE. 207 

r 

of revels. 'He who knows the most, he who 
knows what sweets and virtues are in the 
ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, 
and how to come at these enchantments, is the 
rich and royal man. Only as far as the mas- 
ters of the world have called in nature to 
their aid, can they reach the height of magnifi- 
cence. This is the meaning of their hanging- 
gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, 
and preserves, to back their faulty personality 
with these strong accessories. I do not won- 
der that the landed interest should be invin- 
cible in the state with these dangerous auxil- 
iaries. These bribe and invite ; not kings, not 
palaces, not men, not women, but these tender 
and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. 
We heard what the rich man said, we knew of 
his villa, his grove, his wine, and his company, 
but the provocation and point of the invitation 
came out of these beguiling stars. In their soft 
glances, I see what men strove to realize in 
some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. In- 
deed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and 
the blue sky for the background, which save all 
our works of art, which were otherwise bau- 
bles. When the rich tax the poor with ser- 
vility and obsequiousness, they should consider 
the effect of men reputed to be the possessors 



208 ESSAY VIII. 

of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if 
these rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! 
A boy hears a military band play on the field 
at night, and he has kings and queens, and 
famous chivalry palpably before him. He 
hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, 
in the Notch Mountains, for example, which 
converts the mountains into an -^olian harp, 
and this supernatural tiralira restores to him 
the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all 
the divine hunters and huntresses. Can a 
musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beauti- 
ful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous in 
his picture of society ; he is loyal ; he respects 
the rich ; they are rich for the sake of his im- 
agination ; how poor his fancy would be, if they 
were not rich! That they have some high- 
fenced grove, which they call a park; that 
they live in larger and better-garnished saloons 
than he has visited, and go in coaches, keep- 
ing only the society of the elegant, to water- 
ing-places, and to distant cities, are the ground- 
work from which he has delineated estates of 
romance, compared with which their actual 
possessions are shanties and paddocks. The 
muse herself betrays her son, and enhances 
the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty, by a 
radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests 



NATURE. 209 

that skirt the road, — a certain haughty favor, 
as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind 
of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power 
of the air. 

The moral sensibility which makes Edens 
and Temples so easily, may not be always 
found, but the material landscape is never far 
off. We can find these enchantments without 
visiting the Como Lake, or the Maderia Islands. 
We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In 
every landscape, the point of astonishment is 
the meeting of the sky and the earth, and 
that is seen from the first hillock as well as 
from the top of the AUeghanies. The stars at 
night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest 
common, with all the spiritual magnificence 
which they shed on the Campagna, or on the 
marble deserts of Egypt. The uproUed clouds 
and the colors of morning and evening will 
transfigure maples and alders. I, The differ- 
ence between landscape and landscape is small, 
but there is great difference in the beholder. 
There is nothing so wonderful in any partic- 
ular landscape, as the necessity of being beau- 
tiful under which every landscape lies. Nature 
cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty 
breaks in everywhere. 

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy 

14 



210 ESSAY VIII. 

of readers on this topic, which schoolmen 
called natura naturata^ or nature passive. One 
can hardly speak directly of it without excess. 
It is as easy to broach in mixed companies 
what is called '*the subject of religion.** A 
susceptible person does not like to indulge his 
tastes in this kind, without the apology of 
some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood- 
lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant 
or a mineral from a remote locality, or he 
carries a fowling piece, or a fishing-rod. I 
suppose this shame must have a good reason. 
A dilettantism in nature is barren and un- 
worthy. The fop of fields is no better than his 
brother of Broadway. Men are naturally 
hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I 
suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters 
and Indians should furnish facts for, would 
take place in the most sumptuous drawing- 
rooms of all the **Wreaths** and *'Flora*s 
chaplets'* of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, 
whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a 
topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men 
begin to write on nature, they fall into euphu- 
ism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, 
who ought to be represented in the mythology 
as the most continent of gods. I would not 
be frivolous before the admirable reserve and 



NATURE. 211 

prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the 
right of returning often to this old topic. The 
multitude of false churches accredits the true 
religion. Literature, poetry, science are the 
homage of man to this unfathomed secret, 
concerning which no sane man can affect an 
indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved 
by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of 
God, although, or rather, because there is no 
citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that 
is underneath it: it wants men. And beauty 
of nature must always seem unreal and mock- 
ing, until the landscape has human figures, 
that are as good as itself. If there were good 
men, there would never be this rapture in 
nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody 
looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, 
and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, 
that we turn from the people, to find relief 
in the majestic men that are suggested by the 
pictures and the architecture. The critics 
who complain of the sickly separation of the 
beauty of nature from the thing to be done, 
must consider that our hunting of the pictur- 
esque is inseparable from our protest against 
false society. ; Man is fallen ; nature is erect, 
and serves as a differential thermometer, 
detecting the presence or absence of the 



212 ESSAY VIII. 

divine sentiment in man. By fault of our 
dullness and selfishness, we are looking up to 
nature, but when we are convalescent, nature 
will look up to us. We see the foaming brook 
with compunction: if our own life flowed with 
the right energy, we should shame the brook. 
The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, 
and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. 
Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. 
Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; 
psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show 
where our spoons are gone) ; and anatomy and 
physiology, become phrenology and palmistry. 
But taking timely warning, and leaving 
many things unsaid on this topic, let us no 
longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, 
natura naturans^ the quick cause before which 
all forms flee as the driven snows, itself 
secret, its works driven before it in flocks and 
multitudes (as the ancient represented nature 
by Proteus, a shepherd), and in indescribable 
variety. It publishes itself in creatures, 
reaching from particles and spicula, through 
transformation on transformation to the 
highest symmetries, arriving at consummate 
results without a shock or a leap. A little 
heat, that is, a little motion, is all that differ- 
ences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly cold 



NATURE. 213 

poles of the earth from the prolific tropical 
climates. All changes pass without violence, 
by reason of the two cardinal conditions of 
boundless space and boundless time. Geology 
has initiated us into the secularity of nature, 
and taught us to disuse our dame-school mea- 
sures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic 
schemes for her large style. We know noth- 
ing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we 
learn what patient periods must round them- 
selves before the rock is formed, then before 
the rock is broken, and the first lichen race ^ 

has disintegrated the thinnest external plate JH 

into soil, and opened the door for the remote , ■j^^ 

Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come^iju ^ ^^* 

How far off yet is the trilobite \ how far the 
quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! 
All duly arrive, and then race after race of 
men. It is a long way from granite to the oys- 
ter; farther yet to Plato, and the preaching of 
the immortality of the soul. Yet all must 
come, as surely as the first atom has two sides. 
Motion or change and identity or rest, are 
the first and second secrets of nature : Motion 
and Rest. The whole code of her laws may 
be written on the thumbnail, or the signet 
of a ring. The whirling bubble on the sur- 
face of a brook admits us to the secret of the 



214 ESSAY VIII. 

mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the 
beach is a key to it. A little water made to 
rotate in a cup explains the formation of the 
simpler shells; the addition of matter from 
year to year, arrives at last at the most com- 
plex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all 
her craft, that from the beginning to the end 
of the universe, she has but one stuff, — but 
one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her 
dream-like variety. Compound it how she 
will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still 
one stuff, and betrays the same properties. 

Nature is always consistent though she 
feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps 
her laws, and seems to transcend them. She 
arms and equips an animal to find its place 
and living in the earth, and, at the same time, 
she arms and equips another animal to destroy 
it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by 
clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers, 
she gives him a petty omnipresence. The 
direction is forever onward, but the artist still 
goes back for materials, and begins again with 
the first elements on the most advanced stage: 
otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her 
work, we seem to catch a glance of a system 
in transition. Plants are the young of the 
world, vessels of health and vigor; but they 



NATURE. 215 

grope ever upward toward consciousness; the 
trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan 
their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. 
The animal is the novice and probationer of a 
more advanced order. The men, though 
young, having tasted the first drop from the 
cup of thought, are already dissipated: the 
maples and ferns are still uncorrupt ; yet no 
doubt, when they come to consciousness, they 
too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly 
belong to youth, that we adult men soon come 
to feel that their beautiful generations concern 
not us: we have had our day; now let the 
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and 
we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tend- 
erness. 

Things are so strictly related, that accord- 
ing to the skill of the eye, from any one object 
the parts and properties of any other may be 
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of 
stone from the city wall would certify us of the 
necessity that man must exist, as readily as 
the city. That identity makes us all one, and 
reduces to nothing great intervals on our cus- 
tomary scale. We talk of deviations from nat- 
ural life, as if artificial life were not also nat- 
ural. The smoothest curled courtier in the 
boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, 



216 ESSAY VIII. 

rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipo- 
tent to its ends, and is directly related, there 
anciid essences and billetdoux, to Himmaleh 
mountain- chains, and the axis of the globe. 
If we consider how much we are nature*s, we 
need not be superstitious about towns, as if 
that terrific or benefic force did not find us 
there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who 
made the mason, made the house. We may 
easily hear too much of rural influences. The 
cool, disengaged air of natural objects makes 
them enviable to us, chafed and irritable crea- 
tures with red faces, and we think we shall be 
as grand as they, if we camp out and eat roots ; 
but let us be men instead of wood- chucks, and 
the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, 
though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpels of 
silk. 

This guiding identity runs through all the 
surprises and contrasts of the piece, and char- 
acterizes every law. Man carries the world in 
his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry 
suspended in a thought. Because the history 
of nature is charactered in his brain, there- 
fore, is he the prophet and discoverer of her 
secrets. Every known fact in natural science 
was divined by the presentiment of somebody, 
before it was actually verified. A man does 



NATURE. 217 

not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which 
bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, 
plant, gas, crystal are concrete geometry and 
numbers. Common sense knows its own, and 
recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical 
experiment The common sense of Franklin, 
Dalton, Davy, and Black is the same common 
sense which made the arrangements which now 
it discovers. 

If the identity expresses organized rest, the 
counter-action runs into organization. The 
astronomers said, **Give us matter, and a little 
motion, and we will construct the universe. ' ' 
It is not enough that we should have matter, 
we must also have a single impulse, one shove 
to launch the mass, and generate the harmony 
of the centrifugal forces. Once heave the ball 
from the hand, and we can show how all this 
mighty order grew." — **A very reasonable 
postulate,*' said the metaphysicians, *^and a 
plain begging of the question. Could you not 
prevail to know the genesis of projection, as 
well as the continuation of it?'* Nature, 
meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, 
but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and 
the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a 
mere push, but the astronomers were right in 
making much of it, for there is no end to the 



218 ESSAY VIII. 

consequences of the act. That famous aborig- 
inal push propagates itself through all the 
balls of the system, and through every atom of 
every ball, through all the races of creatures, 
and through the history and performances of 
every individual. Exaggeration is in the 
course of things. Nature sends no creature, 
no man into the world, without adding a small 
excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, 
it is still necessary to add the impulse ; so to 
every creature nature added a little violence of 
direction in its proper path, a shove to put it 
on its way ; in every instance, a slight gener- 
osity, a drop too much. Without electricity the 
air would rot, and without this violence of 
direction, which men and women have, with- 
out a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, 
no efficiency. We aim above the mark, to hit 
the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of 
exaggeration in it. And when now and then 
comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who 
sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses 
to play, but blabs the secret; — how then? is 
the bird flown? O, no, the wary Nature sends 
a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, 
with a little more excess of direction to hold 
them fast to their several aim ; makes them a 
little wrong-headed in that direction in which 



NATURE. 219 

they are tightest, and on goes the game again 
with new whirl, for a generation or two more. 
The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of 
his senses, commanded by every sight and 
sound, without any power to compare and rank 
his sensations, abandoaed to a whistle or a 
painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a ginger- 
bread dog, individualizing everything, general- 
izing nothing, delighted with every new thing, 
lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, 
which this day of continual pretty madness 
has incurred. But Nature has answered her 
purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She 
has kept every faculty, and has secured the 
symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by 
all these attitudes and exertions, — an end of 
the first importance, which could not be trust- 
ed to any care less perfect than her own. This 
glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top 
of every toy to his eye, to ensure his fidelity, 
and he is deceived to his good. We are made 
alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let 
the stoics say what they please, we do not eat 
for the good of living, but because the meat is 
savory and the appetite is keen. The veget- 
able life does not content itself with casting 
from the flower or the tree a single seed, but 
it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of 



220 ESSAY VIII. 

seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands 
may plant themselves, that hundreds may 
come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, 
at least, one may replace the parent. All 
things betray the same calculated profusion. 
The excess of fear with which the animal frame 
is hedged around, shrinking from cold, starting 
at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, pro- 
tects us, through a multitude of groundless 
alarms, from some one real danger at last. 
The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity 
and perfection, with no prospective end; and 
nature hides in his happiness her own end, 
namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the 
race. 

But the craft with which the world is made 
runs also into the mind and character of men. 
No man is quite sane ; each has a vein of folly 
in his composition, a slight determination of 
blood to the head, to make sure of holding him 
hard to some one point which nature had taken 
to heart. Great causes are never tried on their 
merits ; but the cause is reduced to particulars 
to suit the size of the partisans, and the con- 
tention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not 
less remarkable is the over faith of each man 
in the importance of what he has to do or say. 
The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for 



NATURE. 221 

what he utters than any hearer, and, therefore, 
it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent 
Ltither declares with an emphasis, not to be 
mistaken, that **God himself cannot do with- 
out wise men." Jacob Behmen and George 
Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of 
their controversial tracts, and James Naylor 
once suffered himself to be worshiped as the 
Christ. Each prophet comes presently to iden- 
tify himself with his thought, and to esteem 
his hat and shoes sacred. However this may 
discredit such persons with the judicious, it 
helps them with the people, as it gives heat, 
pungency, and publicity to their words. A 
similar experience is not infrequent in private 
life. Each young and ardent person writes a 
diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and 
penitence arrive, he inscribes his souL The 
pages thus written are, to him, burning and 
fragrant ; he reads them on his knees by mid- 
night and by the morning star; he wets them 
with his tears; they are sacred; too good for 
the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the 
dearest friend. This is the man-child that is 
born to the soul, and her life still circulates in 
the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet 
been cut. After some time has elapsed, he 
begins to wish to admit his friend to this hal- 



222 ESSAY VIII. 

lowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with 
firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will 
they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns 
them over, and passes from the writing to con- 
versation, with easy transition, which strikes 
the other party with astonishment and vexa- 
tion. He cannot suspect the writing itself. 
Days and nights of fervid life, of communion 
with angels, of darkness and of light, have en- 
graved their shadowy characters on that tear- 
stained book. He suspects the intelligence or 
the heart of his friend. Is there then no 
friend? He cannot yet credit that one may 
have impressive experience, and yet may not 
know how to put his private fact into litera- 
ture ; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom 
has other tongues and ministers than we, 
that though we should hold our peace the truth 
would not the less be spoken, might check in- 
juriously the flames of our zeal. A man can 
only speak, so long as he does not feel his 
speech to be partial and inadequate. It is par- 
tial, but he does not see it to be so, whilst he 
utters it. As soon as he is released from the 
instinctive and particular, and sees its partial- 
ity, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For, no 
man can write anything, who does not think 
that what he writes is for the time the history 



NATURE. 223 

of the world: or do anything well, who does 
not esteem his work to be of importance. My 
work may be of none, but I must not think it 
of none, or I shall not do it with impunity. 

In like manner, there is throughout nature 
something mocking, something that leads us 
on and on, but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith 
with us. All promise outruns the perform- 
ance. We live in a system of approximations. 
Every end is prospective of some other end, 
which is also temporary; a round and final suc- 
cess nowhere. We are encamped in nature, 
not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us 
on to eat and drink ; but bread and wine, mix 
and cook them how you will, leave us hungry 
and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is 
the same with all our arts and performances. 
Our music, our poetry, our language itself are 
not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunter 
for wealth, which reduces the planet to a gar- 
den, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end 
sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good 
sense and beauty from the intrusion of defor- 
mity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an 
operose method! What a train of means to se- 
cure a little conversation I This palace of brick 
and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these 
stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, 



224 ESSAY VIIL 

and file of mortgages ; trade to all the world, 
country-house and cottage by the water side, 
all for a little conversation, high, clear, and 
spiritual ! Could it not be had as well by beg- 
gars on the highway? No, all these things 
came from successive efforts of these beggars 
to remove friction from the wheels of life, and 
give opportunity. Conversation, character 
were the avowed ends ; wealth was good as it 
appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky 
chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought 
friends together in a warm and quiet room, 
and kept the children and the dinner-table in 
a different apartment. Thought, virtue, 
beauty were the ends ; but it was known that 
men of thought and virtue sometimes had the 
headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time 
whilst the room was getting warm in winter 
days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary 
to remove these inconveniences, the main at- 
tention has been diverted to this object ; the 
old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove 
friction has come to be the end. That is the 
ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, 
Vienna, and now the governments generally 
of the world, are cities and governments of 
the rich, and the masses are not men, but poor 
men, that is, men who would be rich ; this is 




" In woods and waters a certain enticement." — Page 225, 

Emerson's Essays. — Vol. II, 



NATURE. 225 

the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with 
pains and sweat and fury nowhere ; when all is 
done, it is for nothing. They are like one who 
has interrupted the conversation of a company 
to make his speech, and now has forgotten 
what he went to say. The appearance strikes 
the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of 
aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so 
great and cogent, as to exact this immense sac- 
rifice of men? 

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there 
is, as might be expected, a similar effect on 
the eye from the face of external nature. 
There is in woods and waters a certain entice- 
ment and flattery, together with a failure to 
yield a present satisfaction. This disappoint- 
ment is felt in every landscape. I have seen 
the softness and beauty of the summer-clouds 
floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it 
seemed, their height and privilege of motion, 
whilst yet they appeared not so much the 
drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking 
to some pavilions and gardens of festivity be- 
yond. It is an odd jealousy: but the poet finds 
himself not near enough to his object. The 
pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before 
him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is 
still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt 

15 



226 ESSAY VI I L 

and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph 
that has passed by, and is now at its glancing 
splendor and heyday, perchance in the neigh- 
boring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then 
in the adjacent woods. The present object 
shall give you this sense of stillness that fol- 
lows a pageant which has just gone by. What 
splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable 
pomp and loveliness in the sunset ! But who 
can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant 
his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round 
world forever and ever. It is the same among 
the men and women, as among the silent 
trees ; always a referred existence, an absence, 
never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that 
beauty can never be grasped? in persons and 
in landscape is equally inaccessible? The ac- 
cepted and betrothed loved has lost the wildest 
charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. 
She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: 
she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a 
one as he. 

What shall we say of this omnipresent ap- 
pearance of that first projectile impulse, of this 
flattery and baulking of so many well-mean- 
ing creatures? Must we not suppose some- 
where in the universe a slight treachery and 
derision? Are we not engaged to a serious 



NATURE. 227 

resentment of this use that is made of us? 
Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One 
look at the face of heaven and earth lays all 
petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser con- 
victions. To the intelligent, nature converts 
itself into a vast promise, and will not be 
rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many 
and many an (Edipus arrives; he has the 
wholy mystery in his brain. Alas! the same 
sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can 
he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults 
like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no 
archangel's wing was yet strong enough to fol- 
low it, and report of the return of the curve. 
But it also appears that our actions are sec- 
onded and disposed to greater conclusions than 
we designed. We are escorted on every hand 
through life by spiritual agents, and a benefi- 
cent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot 
bandy words with nature, or deal with her as 
we deal with persons. 

If we measure our individual forces against 
hers, we may easily feel as if we were the 
sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, in- 
stead of identifying ourselves with the work, 
we feel that the soul of the workman streams 
through us, we shall find the peace of the 
morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the 



228 ESSAY VIII. 

fathomless powers of gravit}' and chemistry, 
and, over them, of life, pre-existing within us 
in their highest form. 

The uneasiness which the thought of our 
helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, 
results from looking too much at one condition 
of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is 
never taken from the wheel. Wherever the 
impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinu- 
ates its compensation. All over the wide fields 
of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After 
every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and 
furies of its hours; and though we are always 
engaged with particulars, and often enslaved 
to them, we bring with us to every experiment 
the innate universal laws. These, while they 
exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in 
nature forever embodied, a present sanity to 
expose and cure the insanity of men. Our ser- 
vitude to particulars betrays into a hundred 
foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era 
from the invention of a locomotive, or a bal- 
loon ; the new engine brings with it the old 
checks. They say that by electro- magnetism, 
your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst 
your fowl is roasting for dinner : it is a symbol 
of our modern aims and endeavors, — of our 
condensation and accelleration of objects; but 



NATURE. 229' 

nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated, 
man's life is but seventy salads long, grow 
they swift or grow they slow. In these checks 
and impossibilities, however, we find our ad- 
vantage, not less than in the impulses. Let 
the victory fall where it will, we are on that 
side. And the knowledge that we traverse 
the whole scale of being, from the center to 
the poles of nature, and have some stake in 
every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to 
death, which philosophy and religion have too 
outwardly and literally striven to express in 
the popular doctrine of the immortality of the 
soul. The reality is more excellent than the 
report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no 
spent ball. The divine circulations never rest 
nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a 
thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice 
becomes water and gas. The world is mind 
precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever 
escaping again into the state of free thought. 
Hence the virtue and pungency of the influ- 
ence on the mind, of natural objects, whether 
inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, 
man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to 
man impersonated. That power which does 
not respect quantity, which makes the whole 
and the particle its equal channel, delegates its 



230 ESSAY VIIL 

smile to the morning, and distils its essence 
into every drop of rain. Every moment in- 
structs, and every object: for wisdom is in- 
fused into every form. It has been poured 
into us as blood ; it convulsed us as pain ; it 
slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in 
dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful 
labor ; we did not guess its essence, until after 
a long time. 



ESSAY IX. 



POLITICS. 

In dealing with the State, we ought to 
remember that its institutions are not abori- 
ginal, though they existed before we were 
born : that they are not superior to the citizen : 
that every one of them was once the act of a 
single man: every law and usage was a man's 
expedient to meet a particular case: that they 
all are imitable, all alterable; we may make 
better. Society is an illusion to the young 
citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, 
with certain names, men, and institutions, 
rooted like oak-trees to the center, round 
which all arrange themselves the best they 
can. But the old statesman knows that society 
is fluid ; there are no such roots and centers ; 
but any particle may suddenly become the 
center of the movement, and compel the sys- 
tem to gyrate round it, as every man of strong 
will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a 
time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or 
Paul, does forever. But politics rest on neces- 

231 



232 ESSAY IX. 

sary fonndations, and cannot be treated with 
levity. Republics abound in young civilians, 
who believe that the laws make the city, that 
grave modifications of the policy and modes of 
living, and employments of the population, 
that commerce, education, and religion, may 
be voted in or out; and that any measure, 
though it were absurd, may be imposed on a 
people, if only you can get sufficient voices to 
make it a law. But the wise know that foolish 
legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes iu 
the twisting; that the State must follow, and 
not lead the character and progress of the 
citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got 
rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, 
build for eternity; and that the form of 
government which prevails is the expression 
of what cultivation exists in the population 
which permits it.'Is^The law is only a memor- 
andum. We are superstitious, and esteem the 
statue somewhat : so much life as it has in the 
character of living men, so its force. The 
statue stands there to say, yesterday we 
agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article 
to-day? Our statue is a currency, which we 
stamp with our own portrait : it soon becomes 
unrecognizable, and in process of time will 
return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, 



POLITICS. 233 

nor Hmited-monarchial, but despotic, and 
will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her 
authority, by the protest of her sons: and as 
fast as the public mind is opened to more in- 
telligence, the code is seen to be brute and 
stammering. It speaks not articulately, and 
must be made to. Meantime the education 
of the general mind never stops. The 
reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. 
What the tender poetic youth dreams, and 
prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the ridi- 
cule of saying aloud, shall presently be the 
resolutions of public bodies, then shall be car- 
ried as grievance and bill of rights through con- 
flict and war, and then shall be triumphant 
law and establishment for a hundred years, 
until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers 
and pictures. The history of the State 
sketches in coarse outline the progress of 
thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy 
of culture and of aspiration. 

The theory of politics, which has possessed 
the mind of men, and which they have ex- 
pressed the best they could in their laws and 
in their revolutions, considers persons and 
property as the two objects for whose protec- 
tion government exists. Of persons, all have 
equal rights, in virtue of being identical in 



234 ESSAY IX. 

nature. This interest, of course, with its 
whole power demands a democracy. Whilst 
the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue 
of their access to reason, their rights in prop- 
erty are very unequal. One man owns his 
clothes, and another owns a county. This 
accident, depending, primarily, on the skill 
and virtue of the parties, of which there is 
every degree, and, secondarily, on patrimony, 
falls unequally, and its rights, of course, are 
unequal. Personal rights, universally the 
same, demand a government framed on the 
ratio of the census: property demands a 
government framed on the ratio of owners 
and of owning. Laban, who has flocks and 
herds, wishes them looked after by an officer 
of the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive 
them off, and pays a tax to that end. Jacob 
has no flocks or herds, and no fear of the 
Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It 
seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should have 
equal rights to elect the officer who is to de- 
fend their persons, but that Laban, and not 
Jacob, should elect the officer who is to guard 
the sheep and cattle. And, if question arises 
whether additional officers or watch-towers 
should be provided, must not Laban and 
Isaac, and those who must sell part of their 



POLITICS. . 235 

herds to buy protection for the rest, judge 
better of this, and with more right, that Jacob, 
who, because he is a youth and a traveler, 
eats their bread and not his own. 

In the earliest society the proprietors made 
their own wealth, and so long as it comes to 
the owners in the direct way, no other opinion 
would arise in any equitable community, than 
that property should make the law for prop- 
erty, and persons the law for persons. 

But property passes through donation or 
inheritance to those who do not create it. 
Gift, in one case, makes it as really the new 
owner's, as labor made it the first owner's: in 
the other case, of patrimony, the law makes 
an ownership, which will be valid in each man's 
view according to the estimate which he sets 
on the public tranquillity. 

It was not, however, found easy to embody 
the readily admitted principle, that property 
should make law for property, and persons for 
persons: since persons and property mixed 
themselves in every transaction. At last it 
seemed settled, that the rightful distinction 
was, that the proprietors should have more 
elective franchise than non-proprietors, on 
the Spartan principle of *' calling that which 
is just, equal; not that which is equal, just" 



236 ESSAY IX. 

That principle no longer looks so self-evi- 
dent as it appeared in former times, partly, 
because doubts have arisen whether too much 
weight had not been allowed in the laws, to 
property, and such a structure given to our 
usages, as allowed the rich to encroach on the 
poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly, 
• because there is an instinctive sense, however 
obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole 
constitution of property, on its present tenures, 
is injurious, and its influence on persons 
deteriorating and degrading; that truly, the 
only interest for the consideration of the State 
is persons: that property will always follow 
persons ; that the highest end of government 
is the culture of men : and if men can be edu- 
cated, the institutions will share their improve- 
ment, and the moral sentiment will write the 
law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this 
question, the peril is less when we take note of 
our natural defences. We are kept better 
guards than the vigilance of such magistrates 
as we commonly elect. Society always con- 
sists, in greatest part, of young and foolish 
persons. The old, who have seen through the 
hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die, and . 
leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe 



POLITICS. 237 

their own newspaper, as their fathers did at 
their age. y With such an ignorant and deceiv- 
able majority, States would soon run to ruin, 
but that there are limitations, beyond which 
the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. 
Things have their laws, as well as men ; and 
things refuse to be trifled with. Property 
will be protected. Corn will not grow, unless 
it is planted and manured; but the farmer 
will not plant or hoe it, unless the chances are 
a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest 
it. Under any form, persons and property 
must and will have their just sway. They 
exert their power, as steadily as matter its 
attraction. Cover up a pound of earth never 
so cunningly, divide and subdivide it ; melt it 
to liquid, convert it to gas, it will always 
weigh a pound : it will always attract and resist 
other matter, by the full virtue of one pound 
weight; — and the attributes of a person, his 
wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under 
any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper 
force, — if not overtly, then covertly: if not 
for the law, then against it; with right, or by 
might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is 
impossible to fix, as persons are organs of 
moral or supernatural force. Under the 



238 ESSAY IX. 

dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds 
of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious 
sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer 
subjects of calculation. A nation of men 
unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, 
can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, 
and achieve extravagant actions, out of all 
proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the 
Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the 
French have done. 

In like manner, to every particle of property 
belongs it own attraction. A cent is 
the representative of a certain quantity of 
corn or other commodity. Its value is in the 
necessities of the animal man. It is so 
much warmth, so much bread, so much 
water, so much land. The \aw may do what 
it will with the owner of property, its just 
power will still attach to the cent. The law 
may in a mad freak say that all shall have 
power except the owners of property: they 
shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a 
higher law, the property will, year after year, 
write every statute that respects property. 
The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the 
proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the 
whole power of property will do, either 
through the law, or else in defiance of it. Of 



POLITICS 239 

course, I speak of all the property, not merely 
of the great estates. When the rich are out- 
voted, as frequently happens, it is the joint 
treasury of the poor which exceeds their accu- 
mulations. Every man owns something, if it 
is only a cow or a wheelbarrow, or his arms, 
and so has that property to dispose of. 

The same necessity which secures the rights 
of person and property against the malignity 
and folly of the magistrate determines the 
form and methods of governing, which are 
proper to each nation, and to its habits of 
thought, and nowise transferable to other 
states of society. In this country, we are very 
vain of our political institutions, which are 
singular in this, that they sprung, within the 
memory of living men, from the character and 
condition of the people, which they still ex- 
press with sufficient fidelity, — and we osten- 
tatiously prefer them to any other in history. 
They are not better, but only fitter for us. We 
may be wise in asserting the advantage in 
modern times of the democratic form, but to 
other states of society, in which religion con- 
secrated the monarchical, that and not this was 
expedient. Democracy is better for us, 
because the religious sentiment of the present 
time accords better with it. Born democrats, 



240 ESSAY IX. 

we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy, 
which, to our fathers living in the monarchical 
idea, was also relatively right. But our institu- 
tions, though in coincidence with the spirit of 
the age, have not any exemption from the 
practical defects which have discredited other 
forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good 
men must not obey the laws too well. What 
satire on government can equal the severity 
of censure conveyed in the word politics which 
now for ages has signified cunning, intimating 
that the State is a trick? 

The same benign necessity and the same 
practical abuse appear in the parties into 
which each State divides itself, of opponents 
and defenders of the administration of the gov- 
ernment. Parties are also founded on instincts, 
and have better guides to their own hum- 
ble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. 
They have nothing perverse in their origin, 
but rudely mark some real and lasting rela- 
tion. We might as wisely reprove the last 
wind, or the frost, as a political party, whose 
members, for the most part, could give no 
account of their position, but stand for the 
defence of those interests in which they find 
themselves. Our quarrel with them begins, 
when they quit this deep natural ground at the. 



POLITICS. 241 

bidding of some leader, and, obeying personal 
considerations, throw themselves into the 
maintenance and defence of points, nowise 
belonging to their system. A party is perpet- 
ually corrupted by personality. Whilst we 
absolve the association from dishonesty we 
cannot extend the same charity to their 
leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility 
and zeal of the masses which they direct. 
Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circum- 
stance, and not of principle ; as, the planting 
interest in conflict with the commercial ; the 
party of capitalists, and that of operatives; 
parties which are identical in their moral 
character, and which can easily change ground 
with each other, in the support of many of 
their measures. Parties of principle, as relig- 
ious sects, or the party of free-trade, of uni- 
versal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abol- 
ition of capital punishment, degenerate into 
personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. 
The vice of our leading parties in this country 
(which may be cited as a fair specimen of these 
societies of opinion) is, that they do not plant 
themselves on the deep and necessary grounds 
to which they are respectively entitled, but 
lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some 
local and momentary measure, nowise useful to 

16 



242 ESSAY IX. 

the commonwealth. Of the two great parties, 
which, at this hour, almost share the nation 
between them, I should say that one has the 
best cause, and the other contains the best 
men. The philosopher, the poet, or the relig- 
ious man will, of course, wish to cast his vote 
with the democrat, for free trade, for wide 
suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in 
the penal code, and for facilitating in every 
manner the access of the young and the poor 
to the sources of wealth and power. But he can 
rarely accept the persons whom the so-called 
popular party propose to him as representa- 
tives of these liberalities. They have not at 
heart the ends which give to the name of 
democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The 
spirit of our American radicalism is destructive 
and aimless : it is not loving ; it has no ulterior 
and divine ends; but is destructive only out of 
hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the 
conservative party, composed of tlie most 
moderate, able, and cultivated part of the 
population is timid, and merely defensive of 
property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to 
no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes 
no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, 
nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor 
establish schools, nor encourage science, nor 



POLITICS. 243 

emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, 
or the Indian, or the immigrant. From 
neither party, when in power, has the world 
any benefit to expect in science, art or human- 
ity, at all commensurate with the resources of 
the nation. 

I do not for these defects despair of our re- 
public. We are not at the mercy of any waves 
of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, 
human nature always finds itself cherished as 
the children of the convicts at Botany Bay are 
found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as 
other children. Citizens of feudal states are 
alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing 
into anarchy ; and the older and more cautious 
among ourselves are learning from Europeans 
to look with some terror at our turbulent free- 
dom. It is said that in our license of constru- 
ing the Constitution, and in the despotism of 
public opinion, we have no anchor; and one 
foreign observer thinks he has found the safe- 
guard in the sanctity of Marriage among us; 
and another thinks he has found it in our 
Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the pop- 
ular security more wisely, when he compared 
a monarchy and a republic, saying, ''that a 
monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, 
but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to 



244 ESSAY IX. 

the bottom ; whilst a republic is a raft, which 
would never sink, but then your feet are 
always in water/' No forms can have any 
dangerous importance, whilst we are be- 
friended by the laws of things. It makes no 
difference how many tons weight of atmos- 
phere presses on our heads, as long as the same 
pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment 
the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to 
crush us, as long as reaction is equal to action. 
The fact of two poles, of two forces, centrip- 
ital and centrifugal, is universal, and each force 
by its own activity develops the other. Wild 
liberty develops iron conscience. Want of 
liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, 
stupefies conscience. "Lynch-law'* prevails 
only where there is greater hardihood and self- 
subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be a 
permanency: everybody's interests requires 
that it should not exist, and only justice sat- 
isfies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the benefi- 
cent necessity which shines through all laws. 
Human nature expresses itself in them as 
characteristically as in statues, or songs, 
or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of 
nations would be a transcript of the common 
conscience. Governments have their origin 



POLITICS. 245 

in the moral identity of men. Reason for one 
is seen to be reason for another, and for every 
other. There is a middle measure which sat- 
isfies all parties, be they never so many, or so 
resolute for their own. Every man finds a 
sanction for his simplest claims and deeds in 
decisions of his own mind, which he calls 
Truth and Holiness. In these decisions all 
the citizens find a perfect agreement, and 
only in these; not in what is good to eat, good 
to wear, good use of time, or what amount of 
land, or of public aid, each is entitled to claim. 
This truth and justice men presently endeavor 
to make application of, to the measuring of 
land, the apportionment of service, the pro- 
tection of life and property. Their first en- 
deavors no doubt, are very awkward. Yet 
absolute right is the first governor ; or, every 
government is an impure theocracy. The 
idea, after which each community is aiming to 
make and mend its law, is, the will of the wise 
man. The wise man it cannot find in nature, 
and it makes awkward but earnest efforts to 
secure his government by contrivance ; as, by 
causing the entire people to give their voices 
on every measure; or, by a double choice to 
get the representation of the whole ; or, by a 
selection of the best citizens: or, to secure 



246 



ESSAY IX. 



the advantages of efEciency and internal peace, 
by confiding the government to one who may 
himself select his agents. All forms of gov- 
ernment symbolize an immortal government, 
common to all dynasties and independent of 
numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect 
where there is only one man. 

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertise- 
ment to him of the character of his fellows. 
My right and my wrong, is their right and 
their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, 
and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor 
and I shall often agree in our means, and work 
together for a time to one end. But whenever 
I find my dominion over myself not sufficient 
for me, and undertake the direction of him 
also, I overstep the truth, and come into false 
relations to him. I may have so much more 
skill or strength than he, that he cannot 
express adequately his sense of wrong, but it 
is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and 
me. Love and nature cannot maintain the 
assumption : it must be executed by a practical 
lie, namely, by force. This undertaking for 
another is the blunder which stands in the 
colossal ugliness in the governments of the 
world. It is the same thing in numbers as in 
a pair, only not quite so intelligible. I can 



POLITICS. 247 

see well enough a great difference between 
my setting myself down to a self-control, and 
my going to make somebody else act after my 
views: but when a quarter of the human race 
assume to tell me what I must do, I may be 
too much disturbed by the circumstances to 
see so clearly the absurdity of their command. 
Therefore, all public ends look vague and 
quixotic beside private ones. For, any laws 
but those which men make for themselves, are 
laughable. If I put myself in the place of my 
child, and we stand in one thought, and see 
that things are thus or thus, that perception is 
law for him and me. We are both there, both 
act. But if, without carrying him into the 
thought, I look over into his plot, and, guess- 
ing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he 
will never obey me. This is the history of 
governments, — one man does something 
which is to bind another. A man who can- 
not be acquainted with me, taxes me ; look- 
ing from afar at me, ordains that a part of my 
labors shall go to this or that whimsical end, 
not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold 
the consequence. Of all debts, men are least 
willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this 
on government! Everywhere they think they 
get their money's worth, exeept for these. 



248 ESSAY IX. 

Hence, the less government we have, the 
better — the fewer laws, and the less confided 
power. The antidote to this abuse of formal 
Government is the influence of private charac- 
ter, the growth of the Individual ; the appear- 
ance of the principal to supersede the proxy; 
the appearance of the wise man, of whom the 
existing government is, it must be owned, a 
shabby imitation. That which all things tend 
to educe, which freedom, cultivation, inter- 
course, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is 
character; that is the end of nature, to reach 
unto this coronation of her king. To educate 
the wise man, the State exists; and with the 
appearance of the wise man, the State expires. 
The appearance of character makes the State 
unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He 
needs no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men 
too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw 
friends to him ; no vantage ground, no favor- 
able circumstance. He needs no library, for 
he has not done thinking ; no church, for he 
is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the 
lawgiver ; no money, for he is value ; no road, 
for he is at home where he is; no experience, 
for the life of the creator shoots through him, 
and looks from his eyes. He has no personal 
friends, for he who has the spell to draw the 



POLITICS. 249 

prayer and piety of all men unto him needs 
not hnsband and educate a few, to share with 
him a select and poetic life. His relation to 
men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to 
them; his presence, frankincense and flowers. 
We think our civilization near its meridian, 
but we are yet only at the cock crowing and 
the morning star. In our barbarous '■ society 
the influence is in its infancy. As a political 
power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble 
all rulers from their chairs, its presence is 
hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo 
quite omit it; the Annual Register is silent; in 
the Conversations' Lexicon it is not set down ; 
the President's Message, the Queen's Speech, 
have not mentioned it; and yet it is never 
nothing. Every thought which genius and 
piety throw into the world alters the world. 
The gladiators in the lists of power feel, 
through all their frocks of force and simula- 
tion, the presence of worth. I think the every 
strife of trade and ambition are confession of 
this divinity; and successes in those fields are 
the poor amends, the fig-leaf with which the 
ashamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness. 
I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. 
It is because we know how much is due from 
us, that we are impatient to show some petty 



250 ESSAY IX. 

talent as a substitute for worth. We are 
haunted by a conscience of this right to gran- 
deur of character, and are false to it. But 
each of us has some talent, can do somewhat 
useful, or graceful, or formidable, or amusing, 
or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to 
others and to ourselves, for not reaching the 
mark of a good and equal life. But it does not 
satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on the notice of 
our companions. It may throw dust in their 
eyes, but does not smooth our own brow, or 
give us the tranquillity of the strong when we 
walk abroad. We do penance as we go. Our 
talent is a sort of expiation, and we are con- 
strained to reflect on our splendid moment, 
with a certain humiliation, as somewhat too 
fine, and not as one act of many acts, a fair 
expression of our permanent energy. Most 
persons of ability meet in society with a kind 
of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, *'I am not 
all here.'' Senators and presidents have 
^climbed so high with pain enough, not because 
they think the place specially agreeable, but 
as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate 
their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous 
chair is their compensation to themselves for 
being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They 
must do what they can. Like one class of 



POLITICS. 25] 

forest animals, they have nothing but a pre- 
hensile tail: climb they must, or crawl. If a 
man found himself so rich-natured that he 
could enter into strict relations with the best 
persons, and make life serene around him by 
the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, 
could he afford to circumvent the favor of 
the caucus and the press, and covet relations 
so hollow and pompous as those of a politi- 
cian? Surely nobody would be a charlatan, 
who could afford to be sincere. 

The tendencies of the times favor the idea 
of self-government, and leave the individual, 
for all code, to the rewards and penalties of 
his own constitution, which work with more 
energy than we believe, whilst we depend on 
artificial restraints. The movement in this 
direction has been very marked in modern 
history. Much has been blind and discredita- 
ble, but the nature of the revolution is not 
affected by the vices of the revolters; for this 
is a purely moral force. It was never adopted 
by any party in history, neither can be. It 
separates the individual from all party, and 
unites him, at the same time, to the race. It 
promises a recognition of higher rights than 
those of personal freedom, or the security of 
property. A man has a right to be employed, 



252 ESSAY IX. 

to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The 
power of love, as the basis of a State, has 
never been tried. We must not imagine that 
all things are lapsing into confusion, if every 
tender protestant be not compelled to bear his 
part in certain social conventions: nor doubt 
that roads can be built, letters carried, and 
the fruit of labor secured, when the govern- 
ment of force is at an end. Are our methods 
now so excellent that all competition is hope- 
less? Could not a nation of friends even 
devise better ways? On the other hand, let 
not the most conservative and timid fear any- 
thing from a premature surrender of the bay- 
onet, and the system of force. For, according 
to the order of nature, which is quite superior 
to our will, it stands thus ; there will always 
be a government of force, where men are sel- 
fish; and when they are pure enough to abjure 
the code of force, they will be wise enough to 
see how these public ends of the postofifice, of 
the highway, of commerce, and the exchange 
of property, of museums and libraries, of insti- 
tutions of art and science, can be answered. 

We live in a very low state of the world, and 
pay unwilling tribute to governments founded 
on force. There is not, among the most 
religious and instructed men of the most relig- 



POLITICS. 253 

ions and civil nations, a reliance on the moral 
sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity 
of things to persuade them that society can be 
maintained without artificial restraints, as well 
as the solar system, or that the private citizen 
might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, 
without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. 
What is strange, too, there never was in any 
man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, 
to inspire him with the broad design of reno- 
vating the State on the principle of right and 
love. All those who have pretended this 
design ^ave been partial reformers, and have 
admitted in some manner the supremacy of 
the bad State. I do not call to mind a single 
human being who has steadily denied the 
authority of the laws, on the simple ground of 
his own moral nature. Such designs, full of 
genius and full of fate as they are, are not 
entertained except avowedly as air-pictures. 
If the individual who exhibits them dare to 
think them practicable, he disgusts scholars 
and churchmen ; and men of talent, and women 
of superior sentiments, cannot hide their con- 
tempt. Not the less does nature continue to 
fill the heart of youth with suggestions in this 
enthusiasm, and there are now men — if indeed 
I can speak in the plural number, — more 



254 ESSAY IX. 

exactly, I will say, I have just been convers- 
ing to one man, to whom no weight of adverse 
experience will make it for a moment appear 
impossible, that thousands of human beings 
might exercise toward each other the grandest 
and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of 
friends, or a pair of lovers. 



ESSAY X. 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

I cannot often enough say that a man is only 
a relative and representative nature. Each is 
a hint of the truth, but far enough from being 
that truth, which yet he quite newly and inev- 
itably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I 
shall not find it. Could any man conduct into 
me the pure stream of that which he pretends 
to be! Long afterward, I find that quality 
elsewhere which he promised me. The genius 
of the Platonists is intoxicating to the student, 
yet how few particulars of it can I detach from 
all their books! The man momentarily stands 
for the thought, but will not bear examination ; 
and a society of men will cursorily represent 
well enough a certain quality and culture, for 
example, chivalry or beauty of manners; but 
separate them, and there is no gentleman and 
no lady in the group. The least hint sets us 
on the pursuit of a character which no man 
realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes, that 
on seeing the smallest arc, we complete the 

255 



256 ESSAY X. 

curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the 
diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed 
to find that no more was drawn than just that 
fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We 
are greatly too liberal in our construction of 
each other's faculty and promise. Exactly 
what the parties have already done, they shall 
do again, but that which we inferred from 
their nature and inception, they will not do. 
That is in nature, but not in them. That 
happens in the world, which we often witness 
in a public debate. Each of the speakers ex- 
presses himself imperfectly: no one of them 
hears much that another says, such is the pre- 
occupation of mind of each ; and the audience, 
who have only to hear and not to speak, judge 
very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded 
and unskilful is each of the debators to his 
own affair. Great men or men of great gifts 
you shall easily find, but symmetrical men 
never. When I meet a pure, intellectual force, 
or a generosity of affection, I believe, here 
then is man; and am presently mortified by 
the discovery that this individual is no more 
vailable to his own or to the general ends than 
his companions: because the power which 
drew my respect is not supported by the total 
symphony of his talents. All persons exist to 



i 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 25T 

society by some shining trait of beauty or util- 
ity, which they have. We borrow the propor- 
tions of the man from that one fine feature, 
and finish the portrait symmetrically ; which is 
false; for the rest of his body is small or de- 
formed. I observe a person who makes a good 
public appearance, and conclude thence the 
perfection of his private character, on which 
this is based ; but he has no private character. 
He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holi- 
days.' All our poets, heroes, and saints faii 
utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy 
our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, 
and so leave us without any hope of realization 
but in our own future. Our exaggeration of 
all fine characters arises from the fact that we 
identify each in turn with the soul. But there 
are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor 
Pericles, nor Cassar, nor Angelo, nor Wash- 
ington, such as we have made. We consecrate 
a great deal of nonsense, because it was al- 
lowed by great men. There is none without 
his foible. I verily believe if an angel should 
come to chaunt the chorus of the moral law, 
he would eat too much gingerbread, or take 
liberties with private letters, or do some pre- 
cious atrocity. It is bad enough, that our gen- 
iuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse 

17 



258 ESSAY X. 

that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. 
He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come 
near without appearing a cripple. The men of 
fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or by 
courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly 
manner, each concealing, as he best can, his 
incapacity for useful association; but they 
want either love or self-reliance. 

Our native love of reality joins with this ex- 
perience to teach us a little reserve, and to dis- 
suade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant 
qualities of persons. Young people admire 
talents or particular excellences ; as we grow 
older, we value total powers and effects, as, 
the impression, the equality, the spirit of men 
and things. The genius is all. The man, — it 
is his system : we do not try a solitary word or 
act, but his habit. The acts which you praise, 
I praise not, since they are departures from his 
faith, and are mere compliances. The magne- 
tism which arranges tribes and races in one 
polarity is alone to be respected ; the men are 
steel filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, 
and say, '*0 steel-filing number one! what 
heart-drawings I feel to thee ! what prodigious 
virtues are these of thine! how constitutional 
to thee, and incommunicable.*' Whilst, we 
speak, the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls 



I 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 259 

our filing in a heap with the rest, and we con« 
tinne our mummery to the wretched shaving. 
Let us go for universals; for the magnetism^ 
not for the needles. Human life and its per- 
sons are poor empirical pretensions. A per- 
sonal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say^ 
it is great, it is great ; if they say, it is small, 
it is small ; you see it, and you see it not, by 
turns ; it borrows all its size from the momen- 
tary estimation of the speakers: the Will-of- 
the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes 
if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. 
Who can tell if Washington be a great man, 
or no? Who can tell if Franklin be? Yes, or 
any but the twelve, or six, or three gods of 
fame? And they, too, loom and fade before 
the eternal. 

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for 
two elements, having two sets of faculties, the 
particular and the catholic. We adjust our in- 
strument for general observation, and sweep 
the heavens as easily as we pick out a single 
figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are 
practically skilful in detecting elements, for 
which we have no place in our theory, and no 
name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmos- 
pheric influence in men and in bodies of men, 
not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of 



260 ESSAY X. 

all their measurable properties. There is a 
genius of a nation which is not to be found in 
the numerical citizens but which characterizes 
the society. England, strong, punctual, prac- 
tical, well-spoken England, I should go to the 
island to seek it. In the parliament, in the 
play-house, at dinner-tables, book-read, con- 
ventional, proud men, — many old women, — 
and not anywhere the Englishman who made 
the good speeches, combined the accurate en- 
gines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It 
is even worse in America, where, from the in- 
tellectual quickness of the race, the genius of 
the country is more splendid in its promise, 
and more slight in its performance. Webster 
cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive 
distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the 
German genius, and it is not the less real, that 
perhaps we should not meet in either of those 
nations a single individual who corresponded 
with the type. We infer the spirit of the na- 
tion in great measure from the language, which 
is a sort of monument, to which each forcible 
individual in a course of many hundred years 
has contributed a stone. And, universally, a 
good example of this social force is the verac- 
ity of language, which cannot be debauched. 
In any controversy concerning morals, an 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 261 

appeal may be made with safety to the senti- 
ments, which the language of the people ex- 
presses. Proverbs, words, and grammar inflec- 
tions convey the public sense with more purity 
and precision than the wisest individual. 

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, 
the Realists had a good deal of reason. Gen- 
eral ideas are essences. They are our gods: 
they round and ennoble the most partial and 
sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details 
cannot quite degrade our life, and divest it of 
poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as stand- 
ing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is sat- 
urated with the laws of the world. His mea- 
sures are the hours; morning and night, sol- 
stice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and 
all the lovely accidents of nature play through 
his mind. Money, which represents the prose 
of life, and which is hardly spoken of in par- 
lors without an apology, is, in its effects and 
laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps 
the accounts of the world, and is always moral. 
The property will be found where the labor, 
the wisdom, and the virtue have been in na- 
tions, in classes, and (the whole life-time con- 
sidered, with the compensations) in the indi- 
vidual also. How wise the world appears, 
when the laws and usages of nations are largely 



262 ESSAY X. 

detailed, and the coinpleteness of the munici- 
pal system is considered ! Nothing is left out. 
If you go into the markets, and the custom- 
houses, the insurers' and notaries* offices, the 
offices of sealers of weights and measures, of 
inspection of provisions, — it will appear as if 
one man had made it all. Wherever you go, 
a wit like your own has been before you, and 
has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mys- 
teries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian 
astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that 
there always were seeing and knowing men in 
the planet. The world is full of masonic ties, 
of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; 
that of scholars, for example ; and that of gen- 
tlemen fraternizing with the upper class of 
every country and every culture. 

I am very much struck in literature by the 
appearance that one person wrote all the 
books; as if the editor of a journal planted his 
body of reporters in different parts of the field 
of action, and relieved some by others from 
time to time; but there is such equality and 
identity both/ of judgment and point of view 
in the narrative, that it is plainly the work of 
one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked 
into Pope's Odyssey yesterday: it is as cor- 
rect and elegant, after our canon of to-day, as 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 263 

if it were newly written. The modernness of 
all good books seems to give me an existence 
as wide as man. What is well done, I feel as 
if I did; what is ill-done, I reck not of. Shake- 
speare's passages of passion (for example, in 
Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of 
the present year. I am faithful again to the 
whole over the members in my use of books. 
I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a 
manner least flattering to the author. I read 
Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read 
a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy 
and the imagination. I read for the lustres, as 
if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic 
experiment, for its rich colors. 'Tis not Pro- 
clus, but a piece of nature and fate that I ex- 
plore. It is a greater joy to see the author's 
author, than himself, A higher pleasure of 
the same kind I found lately at a concert, 
where I went to hear HandeVs Messiah. As 
the master overpowered the littleness and in- 
capableness of the performers, and made them 
conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to 
observe what efforts nature was making 
through so many hoarse, wooden, and imper- 
fect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid 
and soul-guided men and women. The genius 
of nature was paramount at the oratorio. 



264 ESSAY X. 

This preference of the genius to the parts is 
the secret of that deification of art which is 
found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, 
is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the 
whole by an eye loving beauty in details. 
And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity 
in insanity which it denotes. Proportion is 
almost impossible to human beings. There is 
no one who does not exaggerate. In conversa- 
tion, men are encumbered with personality, 
and talk too much. In modern sculpture, pic- 
ture, and poetry the beauty is miscellaneous; 
the artist works here and there, and at all 
points, adding and adding, instead of unfold- 
ing the unit of his thought. Beautiful details 
we must have, or no artist: but they must be 
means and never other. The eye must not 
lose sight for a moment of the purpose. 
Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and 
the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles 
in it. When they grow older, they respect the 
argument. 

We obey the same intellectual integrity, 
when we study in exceptions the law of the 
world. Anomalous facts, as the never 
quite obsolete rumors of magic and demonol- 
ogy, and the new allegations of phrenologists 
and neurologists, are of ideal use„ They are 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 265 

good indications. Homoeopathy is insignificant 
as an art of healing, but of great value as criti- 
cism on the hygeia or medical practice of the 
time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism 
Fourierism, and the Millennial Church ; they 
are poor pretensions enough, but good criti- 
cism on the science, philosophy, and preaching 
of the day. For these abnormal insights of 
the adepts ought to be normal, and things of 
course. 

All things show us that on every side we are 
very near to the best. It seems not worth 
while to execute with too much pains some 
one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, 
when presently the dream will scatter, and 
we shall burst into universal power. The 
reason of idleness and of crime is the defer- 
ring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we 
beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with 
eating, and with crimes. 

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that 
all the agents with which we deal are subal- 
terns which we can well afford to let pass, 
and life will be simpler when we live at the 
center, and flout the surfaces. I wish to 
speak with all respect of persons, but some- 
times I must pinch myself to keep awake, and 
preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast 



266 ESSAY X. 

into each other, that they are like grass and 
trees, and it needs an effort to tolerate them 
as individuals. Though the uninspired man 
certainly finds persons a conveniency in house- 
hold matters, the divine man does not respect 
them : he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a 
fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the 
surface of the water. But this is fiat rebel- 
lion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she 
resents generalizing, and insults the philos- 
opher in every moment with a million of 
fresh particulars. It is an idle talking: as 
much as a man is a whole, so is he also a part ; 
and it were partial not to see it. What you 
say in your pompous distribution only distri- 
butes you into your class and section. You 
have not got rid of parts by denying them, but 
are the more partial. You are one thing, but 
nature is one thing and the other thing, in 
the same moment. She will not remain orbed 
in a thought, but rushes into persons; and 
when each person, inflamed to a fury of per- 
sonality, would conquer all things to his poor 
crochet, she raises up against him another per- 
son, and by many persons incarnates again a 
sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bot- 
tom cannot play all the parts, work it how he 
may: there will be somebody else, and the 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 267 

world will be round. Everything must have 
its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or 
finer according to its stuff. They relieve and 
recommend each other, and the sanity of 
society is a balance of a thousand insanities. 
She punishes abstractionists, and will only for- 
give an induction which is rare and casual. 
We like to come to a height of land and see 
the landscape, just as we value a general 
remark in conversation. But it is not the in- 
tention of nature that we should live by gen- 
eral views. We fetch fire and water, run 
about all day among the shops and markets, 
and get our clothes and shoes made and 
mended, and are the victims of these details, 
and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at 
a rational moment. If we were not thus infatu- 
ated, if we saw the real from hour to hour, we 
should not be here to write and to read but 
should have been burned or frozen long ago. 
She would never get anything done, if she 
suffered admirable Crichtons, and universal 
geniuses. She loves better a wheelwright who 
dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who 
is part of his horse : for she is full of work, 
and these are her hands. As the frugal 
farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat 
down the rowan, and swine shall eat the 



1268 ESSAY X. 

waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the 
crumbs, so our economical mother despatches 
a new genius and habit of mind into every 
district and condition of existence, plants an 
eye wherever a new ray of light can fall, and 
gathering up into some man every property in 
the universe, establishes thousand-fold occult 
mutual attractions among her off-spring that 
all this wash and waste of power may be im- 
parted and exchanged. 

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this 
incarnation and distribution of the godhead, 
and hence nature has her maligners, as if she 
were Circe ; and Alphonso of Castile fancied he 
could have given useful advice. But she does 
not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the 
bottom of the cup. Solitude would ripen a 
plentiful crop of despots. The recluse thinks 
of men as having his manner, or as not having 
his manner ; and as having degrees of it, more 
or less. But when he comes into a public 
assembly, he sees that men have very different 
manners from his own, and in their way> 
admirable. In his childhood and youth he has 
had many checks and censures, and thinks 
modestly enough of his own endowment. 
When afterward he comes to unfold it in propi- 
tious circumstance, it seems the only talent : he 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 269 

is delighted with his success, and accounts 
himself already the fellow of the great. But 
he goes into a mob, into a banking-house, into 
a mechanic's shop, into a mill, into a labor- 
atory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each 
new place he is no better than an idiot : other 
talents take place, and rule the hour. The 
rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to 
the meridian, reaches to every gift of man, 
and we all take turns at the to'p. 

For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set 
her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, 
and it is so much easier to do what one has 
done before, than to do a new thing, that 
there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode. In 
every conversation, even the highest, there is 
a certain trick, which may be soon learned by 
an acute person, and then that particular style 
continued indefinitely. Each man, too, is a 
tryant in tendency, because he would impose 
his idea on others; and their trick is their 
natural defence, Jesus would absorb the race ; 
but Tom Paine, or the coarsest blasphemer, 
helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of 
power. Hence the immense benefit of party 
in politics, as it reveals faults of character in a 
chief, which the intellectual force of the per- 
sons, with ordinary opportunity, and not 



270 ESSAY X. 

hurled into aphelion by hatred, could not have 
seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit 
that there should be two stupidities! It is 
like that brute advantages so essential to 
astronomy, of having the diameter of the 
earth's orbit for a base of its triangles. Democ- 
racy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in 
the state, and in the schools, it is indispensable 
to resist the consolidation of all men into a 
few men. If John was perfect, why are you 
and I alive? As long as any man exists, there 
is some need of him ; let him fight for his own. 
A new poet has appeared ; a new character 
approached us; why should we refuse to eat 
bread, until we have found his regiment and 
section in our old army-files? Why not a new 
man? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, 
of Skeneateles, of Northampton : why so impa- 
tient to baptize them Essenes, or Port- Royal- 
ists, or Shakers, or by any known and effete 
name? Let it be a new way of living. Why 
have only two or three ways of life, and not 
thousands? Every man is wanted, and no 
man is wanted much. We came this time for 
condiments, not for corn. We want the great 
genius only for joy; for one star more in our 
constellation, for one tree more in our grove. 
But he thinks we wish to belong to him, as he 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 271 

wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. 
I think I have done well, if I have acquired a 
new word from a good author ; and my busi- 
ness with him is to find my own, though it 
were only to melt him down into an epithet or 
an image for daily use. 

**Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!" 

To embroil the confusion, and make it 
impossible to arrive at any general statement, 
when we have insisted on the imperfection of 
individuals, our affections and our experience 
urge that every individual is entitled to honor, 
and a very generous treatment is sure to be 
repaid. A recluse sees only two or three per- 
sons, and allows them all their room; they 
spread themselves at large. The man of state 
looks at many, and compares the few habitually 
with others and these look less. Yet are they 
not entitled to this generosity of reception? 
and is not munificence the means of insight? 
For, though gamesters say that the cards beat 
all the players, though they were never so skil- 
ful, yet in the contest we are now considering, 
the players are also the game, and share the 
power of the cards. If you criticise a fine 
genius, the odds are that you are out of your 
reckoning and, instead of the poet, are censur- 



272 ESSAY X. 

ing your own caricature of him. For there is 
somewhat spheral and infinite in every man, 
especially in ever}^' genius, which, if you can 
come very near him, sports with all your limi* 
tations. For, rightly, every man is a channel 
through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I 
fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring 
or rather terminating my own soul. After 
taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbe- 
lieving, worldly, — I took up this book of 
Helena, and found him an Indian of the wild- 
erness, a piece of pure nature like an apple or 
an oak, large as morning or night, and virtu- 
ous as a briar-rose. 

But care is taken that the whole tune shall 
be played. If he were not kept among sur- 
faces, everything would be large and univer- 
sal : now the excluded attributes burst in on 
us with the more brightness, that they have 
been excluded. **Your turn now, my turn 
next, ' * is the rule of the game. The univer- 
sality being hindered in its primary form, 
comes in the secondary form of all sides: the 
points come in succession to the meridian, and 
by the speed of rotation, a new whole is 
formed. Nature keeps herself whole, and 
her representation complete in the experience 
of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 273 

in her college. It is the secret of the world 
that all things subsist, and do not die, but 
only retire a little from sight, and afterward 
return again. Whatever does not concern us, 
is concealed from us. As soon as a person is 
no longer related to our present well-being, he 
is concealed, or dies, as we say. Really, all 
things and persons are related to us but accord- 
ing to our nature, they act on us not at once, 
but in succession, and we are made aware of 
their presence one at a time. All persons, all 
things which we have known, are here pres- 
ent, and many more than we see ; the world is 
full. As the ancient said, the world is a 
plenum or solid ; and if we saw all things that 
really surround us, we should be imprisoned 
and unable to move. For, though nothing is 
impassable to the soul, but all things are per« 
vious to it, and like highways, yet this is only 
whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as 
the soul sees any object it stops before that 
object. Therefore, the divine Providence, 
which keeps the universe open in every direc- 
tion to the soul, conceals all the furniture and 
all the persons that do not concern a particular 
soul, from the senses of that individual. 
Through solidest eternal things, the man finds 
his road, as if they did not subsist, and does 

18 



274 ESSAY X. 

not once suspect their being. As soon as he 
needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, 
and no longer attempts to pass through it, but 
takes another way. When he has exhausted 
for the time the nourishment to be drawn 
from any one person or thing, that object is 
withdrawn from his observation, and though 
still in his immediate neighborhood, he does 
not suspect its presence. 

Nothing is dead: men feign themselves 
dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful 
obituaries, and there they stand looking out 
of the window, sound and well, in some new 
and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead: he is 
very well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor 
Mahomet, nor Aristotle ; at times we believe 
we have seen them all, and could easily tell 
the names under which they go. 

If we cannot make voluntary and conscious 
steps in the admirable science of universals, 
let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius 
of nature from the best particulars with a 
becoming charity. What is best in each kind 
is an index of what should be the average of 
that thing. Love shows me the opulence of 
nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a 
hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of 
good in every other direction. It is commonly 



i 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 275 

said by farmers, that a good pear or apple costs 
no more time or pains to rear, than a poor 
one; so I would have no work of art, no 
speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but 
the best. 

The end and the means, the gamester and 
the game, — life is made up of the intermix- 
ture and reaction of these two amicable 
powers, whose marriage appears beforehand 
monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish 
the other. We must reconcile the contradic- 
tions as we can, but their discord and their 
concord introduce wild absurdities into our 
thinking and speech. No sentence will hold 
the whole truth, and the only way in which we 
can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; 
Speech is better than silence ; silence is better 
than speech ; — All things are in contact ; every 
atom has a sphere of repulsion ; — Things are 
and are not, at the same time : — and the like. 
All the universe over, there is but one thing, 
this old Two- Face, creator-creature, mind- 
matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition 
may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly, there- 
fore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, 
that nature secures him as an instrument by 
self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to 
religion and science; and now further assert 



276 ESSAY X. 

that, each man*s genius being nearly and 
affectionately explored, he is justified in his 
individuality, as his nature is found to be 
immense ; and now I add, that every man is a 
universalist ; also, and, as our earth, whilst is 
spins on its ow^n axis, spins all the time around 
the sun through the celestial spaces, so the 
least of its rational children, the most dedi- 
cated to his private affair, works out, though 
as it were under a disguise, the universal prob- 
lem. We fancy men are individuals; so are 
pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field 
goes through every point of pumpkin history. 
The rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator 
and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility 
of sincere, radicalism, and unless he can 
resist the sun, he must be conservative the 
remainder of his days. Lord Eldon said is his 
old age, '*that, if he were to begin life again, 
he would be damned but he would begin as 
agitator." 

We hide this universality, if we can, but it 
appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as 
children. There is nothing we cherish and 
strive to draw to us, but in some hour we turn 
and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm 
at ignorance and the life of the senses ; then 
goes by, perchance, a fair girl, apiece of life. 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 277 

gay and happy, and making the commonest 
offices beautiful, by the energy and heart with 
which she does them, and seeing this, we admire 
and love her and them, and say, * 'Lo ! a genuine 
creature of the fair earth, not dissipated, or 
too early ripened by books, philosophy, relig- 
ion, society, or care!" insinuating a treachery 
and contempt for all we had so long loved and 
wrought in ourselves and others. 

If we could have any security against moods ! 
If the profoundest prophet could be holden to 
his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell 
all and join the crusade, could have any cer- 
tificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not 
unsay his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled 
on the Bench, and never interposes an ada- 
mantine syllable ; and the most sincere and rev- 
olutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God 
were carried forward some furlongs, and 
planted there for the succor of the world, shall 
in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same 
speaker, a morbid ; '*I thought I was right, but 
I was not, — and the same immeasurable cre- 
dulity demanded for new audacities. If we 
were not of all opinions ! if we did not in any 
moment shift the platform on which we stand, 
and look and speak from another! if there 
could be any regulation, any *'one-hour rule," 



278 ESSAY X. 

that a man should never leave his point of 
view, without sound of trumpet. I am always 
insincere, as always knowing there are other 
moods. 

How sincere and confidential we can be, say- 
ing all that lies in the mind, and yet go away 
feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapac- 
ity of the parties to know each other, although 
they use the same words! My companion as- 
sumes to know my mood and habit of thought, 
and we go on from explanation to explanation, 
until all is said which words can, and we 
leave matters just as they were at first, be- 
cause of that vicious assumption. Is it that 
every man believes every other to be an incur- 
able partialist, and himself an universalist? I 
talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers : I 
endeavored to show my good men that I love 
everything by turns, and nothing long: that I 
loved the center, but doated on the superficies ; 
that I loved men, if men seemed to me mice 
and rats ; that I revered saints, but woke up 
glad that the old pagan world stood its ground, 
and died hard; that I was glad of men of every 
gift and nobility, but w^ould not live in their 
arms. Could they but once understand that I 
loved to know that they existed, and heartily 
wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 279 

of life and thought, had no word or welcome 
for them when they came to see me, and could 
well consent to their living in Oregon for any 
claim I felt on them, it would be a great satis- 
faction. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN ARMORY 
HALL, ON SUNDAY, 3RD MARCH, 1 844. 

Whoever has had opportunity of acquaint- 
ance with society in New England, during the 
last twenty-five years, with those middle and 
with those leading sections that may constitute 
any just representation of the character and 
aim of the community, will have been struck 
with the great activity of thought and experi- 
menting. His attention must be commanded 
by the signs that the Church, or religious 
party, is falling from the church nominal, and 
is appearing in temperance and non-resistance 
societies, in movements of abolitionists and of 
socialists, and in very significant assemblies, 
called Sabbath and Bible Conventions, — com- 
posed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of 
the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in 
question the authority of the Sabbath, of the 
priesthood, and of the church. In these move- 
ments, nothing was more remarkable than the 
discontent they begot in the movers. The 
spirit of protest and of detachment drove the 

280 



I 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 281 

members of these Conventions to bear testi- 
mony against the church, and immediately 
afterward, to declare their discontent with 
these Conventions, their independence of their 
colleagues, and their impatience of the methods 
whereby they were working. They defied 
each other, like a congress of king, each of 
whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his 
own that made concert unprofitable. What a 
fertility of projects for the salvation of the 
world! One apostle thought all men should 
go to farming; and another, that no man 
should buy or sell ; that the use of money was 
the cardinal evil; another, that the mischief 
was in our diet, that we eat and drink damna- 
tion. These made unleavened bread, and were 
foes to the death to fermentation. It was in 
vain urged by the housewife, that God made 
yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation 
just as dearly as he loves vegetation ; that fer- 
mentation develops the saccharine element in 
the grain, and makes it more palatable and 
more digestible. No; they wish the pure 
wheat, and will die, but it shall not ferment. 
So, dear nature, these incessant advances of 
thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! 
Others attacked the system of agriculture, the 
use of animal manures in farming; and the 



282 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL 

tyranny of man over brute nature ; these abuses 
polluted his food. The ox must be taken from 
the plough, and the horse from the cart, the 
hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and 
the man must walk wherever boats and loco- 
motives will not carry him. Even the insect 
world was to be defended, — that had been too 
long- neglected, and a society for the protection 
of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was 
to be incorporated without delay. With these 
appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hydrop- 
athy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their 
wonderful theories of the Christian miracles! 
Others assailed particular vocations, as that of 
the lawyer, that of the merchant, of the man- 
ufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. 
Others attacked the institution of marriage, as 
the fountain of social evils. Others devoted 
themselves to the worrying of churches and 
meetings for public worship; and the fertile 
forms of antinomianism among the elder pur- 
itans seemed to have their match in the plenty 
of the new harvest of reform. 

With this din of opinion and debate, there 
was a keener scrutiny of institutions and domes- 
tic life than any we had known, there was sin- 
cere protesting against existing evils, and there 
w^ere changes of employment dictated by con- 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 283 

science. No doubt, there was plentiful vapor- 
ing, and cases of backsliding might occur. But 
in each of these movements emerged a good 
result, a tendency to the adoption of simpler 
methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of 
the private man. Thus it was directly in the 
spirit and genius of the age, what happened in 
one instance, when a church censured and 
threatened to excommunicate one of its mem- 
bers, on account of the somewhat hostile part 
to the church which his conscience led him to 
take in the anti-slavery business; the threat- 
ened individuar immediately excommunicated 
the church in a public and formal process. 
This has been several times repeated ; it v/as 
excellent when it was done the first time, but, 
of course, loses all value when it is copied. 
Every project in the history of reform, no mat- 
ter how violent and surprising, is good, when 
it is the dictate of a man's genius and constitu- 
tion, but very dull and suspicious when adopted 
from another. It is right and beautiful in any 
man to say, **I will take this coat, or this book, 
or this measure of corn of yours, ' ' — in whom 
we see the act to be original, and to flow from 
the whole spirit and faith of him ; for then that 
taking will have a giving as free and divine : 
but we are very easily disposed to resist the 



284 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL 

same generosity of speech, when we miss orig- 
inality and truth to character in it. 

There was in all the practical activities of 
New England, for the last quarter of a cen- 
tury, a gradual withdrawal of tender con- 
sciences from the social organizations. There 
is observable throughout, the contest between 
mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a 
steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous 
to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual 
facts. 

In politics, for example, it is easy to see the 
progress of dissent. The country is full of 
rebellion ; the country is full of kings. Hands 
off ! let there be no control and no interfer- 
ence in the administration of the affairs of this 
kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doc- 
trine and of the party of Free Trade, and the 
willingness to try that experiment, in the face 
of what appear incontestable facts. I confess, 
the motto of the globe newspaper is so attract- 
ive to me, that I can seldom find much appe-, 
tite to read what is below it in its columns, 
*'The world is governed too much. " So the 
country is frequently affording solitary exam- 
ples of resistance to the government, solitary 
nullifiers, who throw themselves on their re- 
served rights; nay, who have reserved all 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 285 

their rights ; who reply to the assessor, and to 
the clerk of court, that they do not know the 
State; and embarrass the courts of law, by 
non-juring, and the commander-in-chief of the 
militia, by non-resistance. 

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent 
appeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and do- 
mestic society. A resistless, prying, conscien- 
tious criticism broke out in unexpected quar- 
ters. Who gave me the money with which I 
bought my coat? Why should professional 
labor and that of the counting-house be paid 
so disproportionately to the labor of the por- 
ter, and wood-sawer? This whole business of 
Trade gives me to pause and think, as it con- 
stitutes false relations between men ; inasmuch 
as I am prone to count myself relieved of any 
responsibility to behave well and nobly to that 
person whom I pay with money, whereas if I 
had not that commodity, I should be put on 
my good behavior in all companies, and man 
would be a benefactor to man, as being him- 
self his only certificate that he had a right to 
those aids and services which each asked of 
the other. Am I not too protected a person? 
is there not a wide disparity between the lot 
of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, 
my poor sister? Am I not defrauded of my 



286 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

best culture in the loss of those gymnastics 
which manual labor and the emergencies of 
poverty constitute? I find nothing healthful 
or exalting in the smooth conventions of soci- 
ety ; I do not like the close air of saloons. I 
begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though 
treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I 
pay a destructive tax in my conformity. 

The same insatiable criticism may be traced 
in the efforts for the reform, of Education. 
The popular education has been taxed with 
a want of truth and nature. It was complained 
that an education to things was not given. We 
are students of words; we are shut up in 
schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for 
ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with 
a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not 
know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or 
our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not 
know an edible root in the woods, we cannot 
tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of 
the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim 
and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, 
of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Roman 
rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could 
not learn standing. The old English rule was, 
** All summer in the field, and all winter in the 
study." And it seems as if a man should 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 287 

learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he 
might secure his subsistence at all events, and 
not be painful to his friends and fellowmen. 
The lessons of science should be experimental 
also. The sight of the planet through a teles- 
cope is worth all the course on astronomy ; the 
shock of the electric spark in the elbow outval- 
ues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous 
oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are 
better than volumes of chemistry. 

One of the traits of the new spirit is the in- 
quisition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to 
the dead languages. The ancient languages, 
with great beauty of structure, contain won- 
derful remains of genius, which draw, and al- 
ways will draw, certain like-minded men, — 
Greek men, and Roman men, in all countries, 
to their study; but by a wonderful drowsiness 
of usage, they had exacted the study of all 
men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and 
Greek had a strict relation to all the science 
and culture there was in Europe, and the 
Mathematics had a momentary importance at 
some era of activity in physical science. These 
things became stereotyped as education, as 
the manner of men is. But the Good Spirit 
never cared for the colleges, and though all 
men and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek 



288 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells 
high and dry on the beach and was now creat- 
ing and feeding other matters at other ends of 
the world. But in a hundred high schools and 
colleges this warfare against common sense 
still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the 
pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon 
as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously 
called, he shuts those books for the last time. 
Some thousands of young men are graduated 
at our colleges in this countr)^ every year, and 
the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, 
can all be counted on your hand. I never met 
with ten. Four or five persons I have seen 
who read Plato. 

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal 
talent of this country should be directed in its 
best years on studies which lead to nothing? 
What was the consequence? Some intelligent 
person said or thought: '* Is that Greek and 
Latin some spell to conjure with, and not 
words of reason? If the physician, the law- 
yer, the divine, never use it to come at their 
ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. 
Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I will 
omit this conjugating, and go straight to 
affairs.'* So they jumped the Greek and 
Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 289 

without it. To the astonishment of all, the 
self-made man took even ground at once with 
the oldest of the regular graduates, and in a 
few months the most conservative circles of 
Boston and New York had quite forgotten who 
of their townsmen was college-bred, and who 
was not. 

One tendency appears alike in the philosoph- 
ical speculation, and in the rudest democratical 
movements, through all the petulance and all 
the puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside 
the superfluous, and arrive at short methods, 
urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the 
human spirit is equal to all emergences, alone, 
and that man is more often injured than helped 
by the means he uses. 

I conceive this gradual casting off of material 
aids, and in the indication of growing trust in 
the private, self-supplied powers of the indi- 
vidual, to be the affirmative principle of the 
recent philosophy and that it is feeling its own 
profound truth, and is reaching forward at this 
very hour to the happiest conclusions. I read- 
ily concede that in this, as in every period of 
intellectual activity, there has been a noise of 
denial and protest ; much was to be resisted, 
much was to be got rid of by those who were 
reared in the old, before they could begin to 

19 



290 LECTURE AT ARxMORY HALL. 

affirm and to construct. Many a reformer per- 
ishes in his removal of rubbish, — and that 
makes the offensiveness of the class. They 
are partial ; they are not equal to the work 
they pretend. They lose their way; in the 
assault on the kingdom of darkness, they ex- 
pend all their energy on some accidental evil, 
and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It 
is of little moment that one or^two, or twenty 
errors of our social system be corrected, but of 
much that the man be in his senses. 

The criticism and attack on institutions 
which we have witnessed has made one thing 
plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, 
not himself renovated, attempts to renovate 
things around him? he has become tediously 
good in some particular, but negligent or nar- 
row in the rest ; and hypocrisy and vanity are 
often the disgusting result. 

It is handsomer to remain in the establish- 
ment better than the establishment, and con- 
duct that in the best manner, than to make r 
sally against evil by some single improvement 
without supporting it by a total regeneration. 
Do not be so vain of your one objection. Di 
you think there is only one? Alas! my good 
friend, there is no part of society or of life bet- 
ter than any other part. All our things are 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 291 

dght and wrong together. The wave of evil 
washes all our institutions alike. Do you com- 
plain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no 
worse than our education, our diet, our trade, 
our social customs. Do you complain of the 
laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give 
such importance to them. Can we not play 
the game of life with these counters, as well 
as with those ; in the institution of property, as 
well as out of it. Let into it the new and re- 
newing principle of love, and property will be 
universality. No one gives the impression of 
superiority to the institution, which he must 
give who will reform it. It makes no differ- 
ence what you say; you must make me feel 
that you are aloof from it ; by your natural 
and supernatural advantages, do easily see to 
the end of it, — do see how man can do without 
it. Now all men are on one side. No man 
deserves to be heard against property. Only 
Love, only an Idea, is against property, as we 
:3Lold it. 

,:I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, 
uor to waste all my time in attacks. If I 

diould go out of church whenever I hear a false 
Sentiment, I could never stay there five min- 
utes. But why come out? the street is as false 
as the church, and when I get to my house, or 



292 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

to my manners, or to my speech, I have not 
got away from the lie. When we see an eager 
assailant of one of these wrongs, a special re- 
former, we feel like asking him, What right 
have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue 
piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of 
a beggar. 

In another way the right will be vindicated. 
In the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in 
the aisles of false churches, alike in one place 
and in another, — wherever, namely, a just and 
heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is 
next at hand, and by the new quality of char- 
acter it shall put forth, it shall abrogate that 
old condition, law or school in which it stands, 
before the law of its own mind. 

If partiality was one fault of the movement 
party, the other defect was their reliance on 
Association. Doubts such as those I have in- 
timated, drove many good persons to agitate 
the questions of social reform. But the revolt 
against the spirit of aristocracy, and the invet- 
erate abuses of cities, did not appear possible 
to individuals ; and to do battle against num- 
bers, they armed themselves with numbers, 
and against concert, they relied on new con- 
cert. 

Following, or advancing beyond the ideas of 



, 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 293 

St. Simon of Fourier, and of Owen, three com- 
munities have already been formed in Massa- 
chusetts on kindred plans, and many more in 
the country at large. They aim to give every 
member a share in the manual labor, to give 
an equal reward to labor and to talent, and to 
unite a liberal culture with an education to 
labor. The scheme offers, by the economies 
of associated labor and expense, to make every 
member rich, on the same amount of property, 
that, in separate families, would leave every 
member poor. These new associations are com- 
posed of men and women of superior talents 
and sentiments: yet it may easily be ques- 
tioned, whether such a community will draw, 
except in its beginnings, the able and the good ; 
whether those who have energy will not 
prefer their chance of superiority and power 
in the world, to the humble certainties of the 
Association ; whether such a retreat does not 
promise to become an asylum to those who 
have tried and failed, rather than a field to 
the strong; and whether the members will not 
necessarily be fractions of men, because each 
finds that he cannot enter it, without some 
compromise. Friendship and association are 
very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the 
best of the human race, banded for some 



291 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

catholic object: yes, excellent; but remember 
that no society can ever be so large as one 
man. He in his friendship, in his natural and 
momentary associations, doubles or multiplies 
himself; but in the hour in which he mortga- 
ges himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs 
himself below the stature of one. 

But the men of less faith could not thus 
believe, and to such, concert appears the sole 
specific of strength. I have failed, and you have 
failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. 
Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but 
perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. 
Many of us have differed in opinion, and we 
could find no man who could make the truth 
plain, but possibly a college, or an ecclesias- 
tical council might. I have not been able 
either to persuade my brother or to prevail on 
myself to disuse the traffic or the potation of 
brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total absti- 
nence might effectually restrain us. The can- 
didate my party votes for is not to be trusted 
with a dollar, but he will be honest in the 
Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear 
on him. Thus concert was the specific in all 
cases. But concert is neither better nor worse, 
neither more nor less potent than individual 
force. All the men in the world cannot make 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 295 

a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop 
of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than 
one man cam But let there be one man, let 
there be truth in two men, in ten men, then 
is concert for the first time possible, because 
the force which moves the world is a new 
quality and can ever be furnished by adding 
whatever quantities of a different kind. Wiiat 
is the use of the concert of the false and the 
disunited? There can be no concert in two, 
where there is no concert in one. When the 
individual is not individual, but is dual ; when 
his thoughts look one way, and his actions 
another; when his faith is traversed by his 
habits; when his will, enlightened by reason, 
is warped by his sense; when with one hand 
he rows, and with the other backs water, what 
concert can be? 

I do not wonder at the interest these projects 
inspire. The world is awaking to the idea of 
union, and these experiments show what it 
is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men 
will live and communicate, and plough, and 
reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, 
when once they are united ; as in a celebrated 
experiment, by expiration and respiration 
exactly together, four persons lift a heavy 
man from the ground by the little finger only, 



\ 



296 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

and without sense of weight. Bat this union 
must be inward, and not one of covenants, and 
is to be reached by a reverse of the methods 
they use. The union is only perfect, when all 
the uniters are isolated. It is the union of 
friends who live in different streets or towns. 
Each man, if he attempts to join himself to 
others, is on all sides cramped and diminished 
of his proportion ; and the stricter the union, 
the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But 
leave him alone, to recognize in every hour 
and place the secret soul, he will go up and 
down doing the works of a true member, and, 
to the astonishment of all, the work will be 
done with concert, though no man spoke. 
Government will be adamantine without any 
governor. The union must be ideal in actual 
individualism. 

I pass-to the indication in some particulars of 
that faith in man, which the heart is preach- 
ing to us in these days, and which engages the 
more regard, from the consideration that the 
speculations of one generation are the his- 
tory of the next following. 

In alluding just now to our system of educa- 
tion, I spoke of the deadness of its details. 
But it is open to graver criticism than the 
palsy of its members: it is a system of despair. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 297 

The disease with which the human mind now 
labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in 
a power of education. We do not think we 
can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we 
do not try. We renounce all high aims. We 
believe that the defects of so may perverse and 
so many frivolous people, who make up 
society, are organic, and society is a hospital of 
incurables. A man of good sense but of little 
faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to 
church as often as he went there, said to me, 
'*that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and 
churches, and other public amusements go 
on.'* I am afraid the remark is too honest, 
and comes from the same orio^in as the 
maxim of the tyrant, **If you would rule the 
world quietly, you must keep it amused.*' I 
notice, too, that the ground on which eminent 
public servants urge the claims of popular edu- 
cation is fear: **This country is filling up 
with thousands and millions of voters, and you 
must educate them to keep them from our 
throats. ' ' We do not believe that any educa- 
tion, any system of philosophy, any influence 
of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a 
superficial mind. Having settled ourselves 
into this infidelity, our skill is expended to pro- 
cure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn 



293 



LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 



the victim with manual skill, his tongue with 
languages, his body with inoffensive and 
comely manners. So have we cunningly hid 
the tragedy of limitation and inner death w"e 
cannot avert. Is it strange that society 
should be devoured by a secret melancholy, 
which breaks through all its smiles, and all its 
gayety and games? 

But even one step farther our infidelity has 
gone. It appears that some doubt is felt by 
good and wise men, whether really the hap- 
piness and probity of men is increased by the 
culture of the mind in those disciplines to 
which we give the name of education. Unhap- 
pily, too, the doubt comes from scholars, from 
persons who have tried these methods. In 
their experience, the scholar was not raised by 
the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, 
but used them to selfish ends. He was a pro- 
fane person, and became a showman, turning 
his gifts to a remarkable use, and not to his 
own sustenance and growth. It was found 
that the intellect could be independently 
developed, that is, in separation from the man, 
as any single organ can be invigorated, and 
the result was monstrous. A canine appetite 
for knowledge was generated, which must still 
be fed, but was never satined, and this know- 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 299 

ledge not being directed on action, never took 
the character of substantial, humane truth, 
blessing those whom it entered. It gave the 
scholar certain powers of expression, the 
power of speech, the power of poetry, of liter- 
ary art, but it did not bring him to peace, or 
to beneficence. 

When the literary class betray a destitution 
of faith, it is not strange that society should be 
disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. 
What remedy? Life must be lived on a higher 
plane. We must go up to a higher platform., 
to which we are always invited to ascend; 
there, the whole aspect of things changes. I 
resist the skepticism of our education, and of 
our educated men. I do not believe that the 
differences of opinion and character in men 
are organic. I do not recognize, beside the 
class of the good and the wise a permanent 
class of skeptics, or a class of conservatives, 
or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not 
believe in two classes. 

You remember the story of the poor woman 
who importuned King Philip of Macedon to 
grant her justice, which Philip refused: the 
woman exclaimed, **I appeal:** the king, 
astonished, asked to whom she appealed: the 
woman replied, **from Philip drunk to Philip 



300 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

sober/' The text will suit me very well. I 
believe not in two classes of men, but in man 
in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip 
sober. I think, according to the good-hearted 
word of Plato, ** Unwillingly the soul is 
deprived of truth." Iron conservative, miser, 
or thief, no man is, but by a supposed neces- 
sity, which he tolerates by shortness or tor- 
pidity of sight. The soul lets no man go with- 
out some visitations and holy-days of a diviner 
presence. It would be easy to show, by a nar- 
row scanning of any man's biography, that we 
are not so wedded to our paltry performances 
of every kind, but that every man has at inter- 
vals the grace to scorn his performances, in 
comparing them with his belief of what he 
should do, that he puts himself on the side of 
his enemies, listening gladly to what they say 
of him, and accusing himself of the same 
things. 

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite 
hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius 
counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own 
idea is never exhausted. The Iliad, the 
Plamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, 
the Gothic minister, the German anthem, 
when they are ended, the master casts behind 
him. How sinks the song in the waves of 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 301 

melody which the universe pours over his soul ! 
Before that gracious Infinite, out of which he 
drew these few strokes, how mean they look, 
though the praises of the world attend them. 
From the triumphs of his art, he turns with 
desire to this greater defeat. Let those admire 
who will. With silent joy he sees himself to 
be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which 
his hands have done, all which human hands 
have ever done. 

Well, we are all the children of genius, thetX" ^ 
children of virtue, — and feel their inspirations 
in our happier hours. Is not every man some- 
times a radical in politics? Men are conserva- 
tives when they are least vigorous, or when 
they are most luxurious. They are conserva- 
tives after dinner, or before taking their rest ; 
when they are sick, or aged : in the morning, 
or when their intellect or their conscience have, 
been aroused, when they hear music, or when 
they read poetry, they are radicals. In the 
circle of the rankest tories that could be col- 
lected in England, Old or New, let a powerful 
and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart 
and mind, act on them, and very quickly these 
frozen conservators will yield to the friendly 
influence, these hopeless will begin to hope, 
these haters will begin to love, these immov- 



302 



LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 



able statues will begin to spin and revolve. I 
cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which 
Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he 
was preparing to leave England, with his plan 
of planting the gospel among the American 
savages. "Lord Bathurst told me, that the 
members of the Scriblerus club, being met at 
his house at dinner, they agreed to rally 
Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his 
scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having 
listened to the many lively things they had to 
say, begged to be heard in his turn, and dis- 
played his plan with such an astonishing and 
animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm, 
that they were struck dumb, and, after some 
pause, rose up altogether with earnestness, 
exclaiming, 'Let us set out with him immedi- 
ately.' " Men in all ways are better than 
they seem. They like flattery for the moment, 
but they know the truth for their own. It is 
a foolish cowardice v/hich keeps us from trust- 
ing them, and speaking to them rude truth. 
They resent your honesty for an instant, they 
will thank you for it always. What is it we 
heartily wish of each other? Is it to be 
pleased and flattered? No, but to be con- 
victed and exposed, to be shamed out of our 
nonsense of all kinds, and made men of. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 303 

instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are 
weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, 
which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave 
a sense of reality, though it comes in strokes 
of pain. I explain so, — by this manlike love 
of truth, — those excesses and errors into 
which souls of great vigor, but not equal 
insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at 
the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the 
v/orld. They know the speed with which they 
come straight through the thin masquerade, 
and conceive a disgust at the indigence of 
nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau, Charles Fox, 
Napoleon, Byron, — and I could easily add 
names nearer home, of raging riders, who 
drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of 
living to forget its illusion : they would know 
the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The 
heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, 
Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, 
have treated life and fortune as a game to be 
vv^ell and skilfully played, but the stake not to 
be so valued, but that any time it could be 
held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. 
Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, dis- 
courses with the Egyptian priest, concerning 
the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the 



804 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will 
show him those mysterious sources. 

The same magnanimity shows itself in our 
social relations, in the preference, namely, 
which each man gives to the society of supe- 
riors over that of his equals. All that a man 
has, will he give for right relations with his 
mates. All that he has, will he give for an 
erected demeanor in every company and on 
each condition. He aims at such things as his 
neighbor's prize, and gives his days and 
nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a 
good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's 
sight as a man. The consideration of an emi- 
nent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of 
mark in his profession; naval and military 
honor, a general's commi^ion, a marshal's 
baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of poets, and 
anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of 
eminent merit, have this lustre for each candi- 
date, that they enable him to walk erect and 
unabashed, in the presence of some persons, 
before whom he felt himself inferior. Having 
raised himself to this rank, having established 
his equality with class after class of those with 
whom he would live well, he still finds certain 
others, before whom he cannot possess him- 
self, because they have somewhat fairer, some- 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 305 

what grander, somewhat purer, which extorts 
homage of him. Is his ambition pure? then 
will his laurels and his possessions seem worth- 
less : instead of avoiding these men who make 
his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him, 
and seek their society only, woo and embrace 
this, his humiliation and mortification, until he 
shall' know why his eye sinks, his voice is 
husk}^', and his brilliant talents are paralyzed 
in his presence. He is sure that the soul which 
gives the lie to all things, will tell none. His 
constitution will not mislead him. If it can- 
not carry itself as it ought, high and unmatch- 
able in the presence of any man, if the secret 
oracles whose whisper makes the sweetness 
and dignity of his life, do here withdraw and 
accompany him no longer, it is time to under- 
value what he has valued, to dispossess him- 
self of what he has acquired, and with Caesar 
to take in his hand the army, the empire, and 
Cleopatra, and say, *'A11 these will I relin- 
quish, if you will show me the fountains of the 
Nile. ' * Dear to us are those who love us ; the 
swift moments we spend with them are a com- 
pensation for a great deal of misery; they 
enlarge our life; — but dearer are those who 
reject us as unworthy, for they add another 
life: they build a heaven before us, whereof 

20 



306 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us 
new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, 
and urge us to new and unattempted per- 
formances. 

As every man at heart wishes the best and 
not inferior society, wishes to be convicted of 
his error and to come to himself, so he wishes 
that the same healing should not stop in his 
thought, but should penetrate his will or active 
power. The selfish man suffers more from his 
selfishness than he from whom that selfishness 
withholds some important benefit. What he. 
most wishes it to be lifted to some higher plat- 
form, that he may see be3^ond his present fear 
the transalpine good, so that his fear, his 
coldness, his custom, may be broken up like 
fragments of ice, melted and carried away in 
the great stream of good will. Do you ask my 
aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish 
more to be a benefactor and servant than you 
wish to be served by me, and surely the 
greatest good fortune that could befall me is 
precisely to be so moved by you that I should 
say, '*Take me and all mine, and use me and 
mine freely to your ends!" for, I could not say 
it, otherwise than because a great enlargement 
had come to my heart and mind, which made 
me paralyzed with fear ; we hold on to our 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 307 

little properties, house and land, office and 
money, for the bread which they have in our 
experience yielded us, although we confess 
that our being does not flow through them. 
We desire to be made great, we desire to be 
touched with that fire which shall command 
this ice to stream, and make our existence a 
benefit. If therefore we start objections to 
your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of 
the poor, or of the race, understand well, that 
it is because we wish to drive you to drive us 
into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves 
confuted. We are haunted with a belief that 
you have a secret, which it would highliest 
advantage us to learn and we would force yon. 
to impart it to us, though it should bring us to 
prison, or to worse extremity. 
v/ Nothing shall warp me from the belief that 
every man is a lover of truth. There is no 
pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The 
entertainment of the proposition of depravity 
is the last profligacy and profanation. There 
is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could 
it be received into common belief, suicide 
would unpeople the planet. It has had a name 
to live in some dogmatic theology, but each 
man's innocence and his real liking of his 
neighbor have kept it a dead letter. I remem- 



308 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

ber standing at the polls one day, when the 
anger of the political contest gave a certain 
grimness to the faces of the independent elec- 
tors, and a good man at my side looking on the 
people, remarked, "I am satisfied that the 
largest part of these men, on either side, mean 
to vote right. " I suppose, considerate obser- 
vers looking at the masses of men, in their 
blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will 
assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, 
the general purpose in the great number of 
persons is fidelity. The reason why any one 
refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to 
your benevolent design, is in you : he refuses 
to accept you as a bringer of truth, because 
though }^ou think you have it, he feels that you 
have it not. You have not given him the 
authentic sign. 

If it were worth while to run into details 
this general doctrine of the latent but ever 
soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduce 
illustration in particulars of a man*s equality to 
the church, of his equality to the state, and of 
his equality to every other man. It is yet in 
all men's memory, that, a few years ago, the 
liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic 
church denied to them the name of Christian. 
I think the complaint was confession: a religi- 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 309 

ous church would not complain. A religious 
man like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborg, is 
not irritated by wanting the sanction of the 
church, but the church feels the accusation of 
his presence and belief. 

It only needs that a just man should walk in 
our streets, to make it appear how pitiful and 
inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. 
The man whose part is taken, and who does 
not wait for society in anything, has a power 
which society cannot choose but feel. The 
familiar experiment called the hydrostatic para- 
dox, in which a capillary column of water 
balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation 
of one man to the whole family of men. The 
wise Dandini, on hearing the lives of Socrates, 
Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, "judged them 
to be great men every way, excepting, that 
they were too much subjected to the reverence 
of the laws, which to second and authorize, 
true virtue must abate very much of its 
original vigor. * * 

And as a man is equal to the church, and 
equal to the state, so he is equal to every other 
man. The disparities of power in men are 
superficial; and all frank and searching con- 
versation, in which a man lays himself open to 
his brother, apprizes each of their radical 



310 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

unity. When two persons sit and converse in 
a thoroughly good understanding, the remark 
is sure to be made, See how we have disputed 
about words! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, 
such as every man knows among his friends, 
converse with the most commanding poetic 
genius, I think it would appear that there was 
no inequality such as men fancy between them ; 
that a perfect understanding, a like receiving, 
a like perceiving, abolished differences, and 
the poet would confess that his creative imagi- 
nation gave him no deep advantage, but only 
the superficial one, that he could express him- 
self, and the other could not ; that his advan- 
tage was a knack, which might impose on 
indolent men, but could not impose on lovers 
of truth ; for they know the tax of talent, or, 
what a price of greatness the power of expres- 
sion too often pays. I believe it is the convic- 
tion of the purest men, that the net amount of 
man and man does not much vary. Each is 
incomparably superior to his companion in 
some faculty. His want of skill in other 
directions has added to his fitness for his own 
work. Each seems to have some compensa- 
tion yielded to him by his infirmity, and every 
hindrance operates as a concentration of his 
force. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 311 

These and the like experiences intimate that 
man stands in strict connection with a higher 
fact never yet manifested. There is power 
over and behind us, and we are the channels 
of its communications. We seek to say thus 
and so, and over our head some spirit sits, 
which contradicts what we say. We would 
persuade our fellow to this or that; another 
self within our eyes dissuades him. That 
which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we 
compose our faces and our words; it holds 
uncontrollable communication with the enemy, 
and he answers civilly to us, but believes the 
spirit. We exclaim, '* There's a traitor in the 
house!'* but at last it appears that he is the 
true man, and I am the traitor. This open 
channel to the highest life is the first and last 
reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, 
that although I have never expressed the 
truth, and although I have never heard the 
expression of it from any other, I know that 
the whole truth is here for me. What if I can- i^^ 
not answer your questions? I am not pained 
that I cannot frame a reply to the question, 
What is the operation we call Providence? 
There lies the unspoken thing, present, omni- 
present. Every time we converse, we seek to 
translate it into speech, but whether we hit, 



312 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

or whether we miss, we has the fact. Every 
discourse is an approximate answer: but it is 
of small consequence that we do not set into 
verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contem- 
plation forever. 

If the auguries of the prophesying heart 
shall make themselves good in time, the man 
who shall be born, whose advent men and 
events prepare and foreshow, is one who sihall 
enjoy his connection with a higher life, with 
the man within man ; shall destroy distrust by 
his trust, shall use his native but forgotten 
methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and 
blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and 
beautiful, which works over our heads and 
under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our 
success, when we obey it, and of our ruin, 
when we contravene it. Men are all secret 
believers in it, else the word justice would 
have no meaning: they believe that the best is 
the true; that right is done at last; or chaos 
would come. It rewards actions after their 
nature, and not after the design of the agent. 
* *Work, * ' it saith to man, * * in every hour, paid 
or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou 
canst not escape the reward : whether thy work 
be fine or coarse, planting corn, or writing 
epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 313 

own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the 
senses as well as to the thought : no matter 
how often defeated, you are born to victory. 
The reward of a thing well done, is to have 
done it.** ^ 

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond 
surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails 
without an exception or an interval, he settles 
himself into serenity. He can already rely 
on the laws of gravity, that every stone will 
fall where it is due ; the good globe is faith- 
ful, and carries us securely through the celes- 
tial spaces, anxious or resigned: we need not 
interfere to help it on, and he will learn, one 
day, the mild lesson they teach, that our own 
orbit is all our task, and we need not assist the 
administration of the universe. Do not be so 
impatient to set the town right concerning the 
unfounded pretensions and the false reputa- 
tion of certain men of standing. They are 
laboring harder to set the town right concern- 
ing themselves, and will certainly succeed. 
Suppress for a few days your criticism on the 
insufficiency of this or that teacher or experi- 
menter, and he will have demonstrated his 
insufficiency to all men's eyes. In like man- 
ner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and 
he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is 



814 LECTURE AT ARMORY HALL. 

the only liberating influence. We wish to 
escape from subjection, and a sense of inferi- 
ority, — and we make self-denying ordinances, 
w^e drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the 
laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by 
obedience to his genius; only by the freest 
activity in the way constitutional to him, does 
an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead 
him by the hand out of all the wards of the 
prison. 

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty 
and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and cour- 
age, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. 
The life of man is the true romance, which, 
when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the 
imagination a higher joy than any fiction. All 
around us, what powers are wrapped up under 
the coarse mattings of custom, and all wonder 
prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurolo- 
gists that a man can see without his eyes, that 
it does not occur to them that it is just as won- 
derful that he should see with them ; and that 
is ever the difference between the wise and 
the unwise: the latter wonders at what is 
unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual. 
Shall not the heart which has received so much 
trust the Power by which it lives? May it 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 315 

not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul 
that has guided it so gently, and taught it so 
much, secure that the future will be worthy of 
the past? 

THE END. 



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